Over a more than 40-year international career as a singer, actress and stage artist, Ute Lemper has created a distinctive artistic profile of her own. She is particularly renowned worldwide for her interpretations of Berlin cabaret songs as well as the works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Her repertoire encompasses chansons by Marlene Dietrich, Édith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, Jacques Prévert, Nino Rota and Astor Piazzolla, as well as her own compositions. Her work brings together the worlds of concert, musical theatre, acting and film and has taken her to the stages of Broadway, Paris, Berlin and London’s West End.
Among her current concert projects is in particular Rendezvous with Marlene at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, a tribute to Marlene Dietrich based on a three-hour telephone conversation between the two artists in Paris in 1988. Most recently, she revived Die sieben Todsünden by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and performed it, among other engagements, with the Potsdamer Kammerakademie and together with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Numerous musical roles in London, New York, Las Vegas, Berlin and Vienna earned her awards including the French Molière Prize in 1986 (as Best Actress in the European revival of Cabaret), as well as the Olivier Award in 1998 for her performance in the London production of Chicago and the American Theatre Award for her Broadway performance. Maurice Béjart created the ballet “La Mort Subite” especially for Ute Lemper, which premiered in Paris in 1990.
After several tours around the globe, Ute Lemper increasingly turned to the cinema screen as well. Among other films, she appeared in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, Robert Altman’s Pret A Porter, Pierre Granier-Deferre’s L’Autrichienne, Ivan Dikhovichni’s Moscow Parade, Norman Jewison’s Bogus, Benoit Lamy’s Combat de Fauves, James Merendino’s A River Made to Drown In and George Milton’s Appetite.
In recent years, Ute Lemper has toured the world with songs by Astor Piazzolla, Jacques Brel, Hanns Eisler and her own creations, while simultaneously developing “Nomade” together with Robert Carsen, a stage show that premiered to great acclaim in 2003 at the Chatelet Theater in Paris. Each year, around the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she also presents her programme Songs for Eternity, featuring songs by Jewish prisoners from ghettos and concentration camps that were written between 1942 and 1944. She also launched a song project dedicated to Charles Bukowski and recorded a new CD together with the Vogler Quartett and pianist Stefan Malzew (Berlin Days/Paris Nights), which they have already presented to audiences on a joint US tour. The CD includes songs by Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, Brel, Piaf and Piazzolla, as well as Yiddish and Russian folk songs, and was also nominated for a Grammy Award.
Further projects include a song cycle entitled “Forever – The Love Poems of Pablo Neruda” based on love poems by Pablo Neruda, which she composed together with bandoneonist Marcelo Nisinman.
In 2015, Ute Lemper toured the world with her new album 9 Secrets: in it, she set selected chapters from Paulo Coelho’s book “Manuscript Found in Accra” to music in nine thematic songs; the album was released by EDEL in autumn 2015 and internationally by the STEINWAY Label in 2016.
Ute Lemper was born in Münster in 1963 and completed her training in piano, dance and theatre in Cologne, at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, in Salzburg and in Berlin.