German-born Rosel Zech started her professional acting career in the theater in the 1970s. Her interpretation of Hedda in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler won her recognition in her own country as Best Actress of the Year in 1977. She began her film work in 1973, working with top German directors, such as Peter Zadek and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In 1973, Rosel made her film debut in Ulli Lommel's chilling story The Tenderness of Wolves. She received high praise for her role in Zadek's Ice Age (1975), with her portrayal of a nurse who befriends former Nazi collaborator Knut Hamsum, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who lived out his last years in a nursing home.
The excesses of World War II were the subject of a trilogy of films made by Fassbinder. Zech had parts in two of them: a supporting role in Lola (1981), and the title role in Veronika Voss (1982). Veronika Voss is a portrait of a once-celebrated screen actress and intimate of Joseph Goebbels, said to be based on a true story. The audience watches as the aging hetaira grapples with her loss of youth, beauty, and stature in a deadly decline into drugs and degradation, exploitation, and betrayal.
The actress continued to work in the German cinema, in Alexander Kluge's Odds and Ends (1987), The Blind Director (1985), and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time, as well as in Peter Beauvais' A Runaway Horse (1986). It was with the Percy Adlon film Salmonberries (1993) that Zech made her biggest impression on American audiences. Set in the great expanse of Alaska, the film features Zech playing opposite k.d. lang, in an offbeat love story, in which the two women find shelter from their lives' many storms in each other's company. Zech is luminescent as the recently widowed German with a new job and a new life in the American frontier.
The subject of Nazi Germany turns up again in her role in the surreal 1995 film Hades, directed by Herbert Achternbusch, in which personal remembrance and guilt recall that dark chapter in human history.
Zech next appeared in Aimee and Jaguar (2000), directed by Max Färberböck. Set during the Holocaust, the story centers on the unlikely love affair between two women caught in the madness of wartime Germany. Zech displays once again her gift for creating complex and sympathetic characters, which has always been the hallmark of her performances.
