BERLIN (AP) – German actress Inge Meysel, who earned the nickname “Mother of the Nation” in her days on television after World War II has died of heart failure at her home in Bullenhausen, near Hamburg, according to her manager Peter Knuth. She was 94.

Meysel, who was banned from the stage during the Nazi era because her father was Jewish, appeared in many popular television shows after the war. Over the last 40 years she had played 100 roles on stage and television.

As a concierge on the 1959-1960 series, “Das Fenster zum Flur” (“The Window to the Hall”), she was nicknamed “Mother of the Nation.” She said, however, she was not the maternal type.

She last performed at the end of May, appearing in an episode of a German crime series.

German President Horst Koehler said the country had “lost an outstanding actress who got to people’s hearts.”

She recently had been confined to bed with a broken hip. Her ashes will be interred in Ohlsdorfer Cemetery in Hamburg near those of her husband John Olden, who died in 1965, Knuth said.

AP-ES-07-11-04 1149EDT



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