German film and TV producer Regina Ziegler dies unexpectedly in Berlin at age 82

Death confirmed by her company

The film and television producer Regina Ziegler died unexpectedly on Sunday, 1 November, in Berlin, aged 82. A spokesperson for Ziegler Film GmbH confirmed the death to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). Bild, which first reported it, cited her daughter as the source. Blick says she died in a Berlin hospital during the night from Saturday to Sunday, and Spiegel adds that she died among her family.

From Quedlinburg to her own company

Regina Ziegler was born on 8 March 1944 in Quedlinburg, Saxony-Anhalt, the daughter of a journalist and a well-digger who also worked as a water diviner. Her family fled to the Weserbergland at the end of the Second World War, and she spent her childhood and youth there. After one semester of law, she trained as an English-language business interpreter and around 1965 became a production assistant at Sender Freies Berlin. In 1973, at 29, she left her staff job and founded her own production company, financing it with money borrowed from friends and relatives, as she later recounted in her 2017 autobiography Geht nicht, gibt's nicht. Ziegler is described as the first woman in West Germany to found her own film production company. In a 2023 interview with Blick, she summed up her approach in one line:

“A no does not always have to remain a no.”

Films, television and awards

Ziegler worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Kamikaze 1989, with Volker Schlöndorff on Rückkehr nach Montauk and with Ulrich Schamoni on Chapeau Claque. Her first feature, Ich dachte, ich wäre tot, won the Bundesfilmpreis and was the directing debut of Wolf Gremm, who later became her husband and whom she married in 1979. Gremm died in 2015. On television she was linked to ARD's Weissensee, whose first season won the German Television Award for best series, as well as ZDF's Familie Bundschuh and Kommissarin Heller. Her body of work is given as about 500 productions, more than 500 in some reports. Her awards include the German Film Prize, the International Emmy and the Grimme Prize, plus lifetime honours in 2012, 2016 and 2018. In 2016 she received an honorary Lola at the German Film Prize in Berlin, where Iris Berben, president of the German Film Academy, praised her energy, charm and determination. A retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is dated to 2006 in one report and to 2016 in another.

Final years

Ziegler ran the Berlin company Ziegler Film together with her daughter. Bild reported that she kept working on new projects until the end. Her last public appearance was on 6 October at a film premiere in Berlin. Asked about retirement in 2026, she reacted with outrage and asked what kind of word that was. She had set herself an ambitious goal:

“I will be 100, and until then I still want to produce a great deal!”

She died before reaching that goal.