Ilja Richter (born 24 November 1952) is a German actor, voice actor, television presenter, singer, theatre director and author, best known as the presenter of the ZDF show Disco.
Life
Richter was born in East Berlin to Georg and Eva Richter. Georg was a Communist, who named Ilja after the Russian journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, and Eva was a Jew who survived the Third Reich under a fake Aryan identity. Georg spent nine and a half years in concentration camps during the Third Reich.
After the family was in political difficulties in East Germany, they moved to West Berlin in 1953. There, the Richters leased a restaurant. In 1955, Ilja's sister Janina was born, and in 1959 they moved to Cologne. There, too, the Richters ran a restaurant, but moved back in 1960 to West Berlin, where they opened a guesthouse.
Eva, a former actress, brought Ilja to the Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin) for an audition. Ilja's acting career began at the age of nine. As a teenager he starred in the series Till, the Boy Next Door as Albert. In the 1970s, Richter became famous in West-Germany as television presenter of Disco, a music show filmed before a young live audience in which he also performed in sketches.
Richter wrote several books. He dated the singer Marianne Rosenberg from 1975 to 1978. From 1995 to 1997 he was married to singer Stephanie von Falkenhausen. He lives in Berlin with his longtime companion Barbara Ferun, and has one child, Kolja.
Ilja Richter, Erich Rauschenbach (illustrator): Bruno – Von Bären und Menschen. Boje, Cologne 2007. ISBN978-3-414-82047-1.
Du kannst nicht immer 60 sein. Mit einem Lächeln älter werden. Riva, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-86883-294-5.
Ilja Richter: Nehmen Sie’s persönlich: Porträts von Menschen, die mich prägten. With photos of Joseph Gallus Rittenberg, Elsinor Verlag, Coesfeld 2022, ISBN 978-3-942788-70-0.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ilja Richter.
