Her death was announced by her son, Dominik Elstner, a photographer, on his website. German media outlets reported that she had breast cancer.
Since her first appearance onscreen, in 1959, Elsner had been a fixture of German television. She was one of the country’s best-known actors, both on television and in movies.
But it was not until she was in her late 50s that she made her international breakthrough, in “No Place to Go” (2000), directed by Oskar Roehler, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and released in other countries. It won Germany’s highest film award, the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Prize) in Gold, and Elsner won the Deutscher Filmpeis for best actress for her performance as a tormented West German writer despairing over the collapse of Communism in East Germany and confronting her past.
In his review, New York Times critic A.O. Scott said Elsner “holds the screen with the intensity of a silent-film goddess.”
By that time she was a household name in Germany for playing the title role on “Die Kommissarin” (“The Inspector”), the country’s first crime series to feature a woman as the lead detective. It ran from 1994 to 2006.
“I thought up the name Lea Sommer,” she said of her character in an interview with the magazine Emma in 2000. “She was supposed to be Martina Winter, but that is a name for a model, not for an inspector.”
As played by Elsner, Lea was a pistol-toting detective who wore high heels and showed toughness and intensity in investigating crimes, but who also had a strain of vulnerability and a sly sense of humor.
The series helped turn Elsner into a role model as an independent woman, both on and off the screen. While working on the series she was raising her son, from a brief relationship with German television director Dieter Wedel, as a single mother.
Hannelore Elstner (she later dropped the “t” from her last name) was born July 26, 1942, in Burgenhausen, near the Austrian border. In an interview with the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitungin 2015, she recalled a difficult early life: When she was 3, her brother died in an air raid; five years later her father, an engineer, died of tuberculosis. Her mother worked various jobs after the war to support the family.
Her mother moved the family to Munich, where Elsner was discovered by a young Turkish film director when she was 16. He wanted to cast her in a film; the film was never made, but the encounter led her to attend the Munich School of Acting. She graduated in 1962.
She started her film career with “Immer die Mädchen” (“Always the Girls”) and “Freddy Unter Fremden Sternen,” (“Freddy Under Foreign Stars”), both released in 1959. Through the 1970s, she earned a reputation as a muse for directors of the New German Cinema, including Alf Brustellin, whom she later married, as well as Heidi Genée and Edgar Reitz.
Elsner was married three times, to actor Gerd Vespermann from 1964 to 1966, to Brustellin from 1973 until his death in 1981, and to Uwe B. Carstensen from 1993 until their divorce in 2000. Her son is her only immediate survivor.
After the renewed attention that came from “No Place to Go,” Dani Levy cast Elsner as a gentile wife struggling to adapt to Jewish traditions in his comedy “Go for Zucker!” (2004). Elsner reveled in the movie’s humor, telling an interviewer in 2005, “I don’t remember the last time I laughed so much during the shooting of a film.”
Her most recent film, “Cherry Blossoms and Demons” — a sequel by German director Doris Dörrie to her “Cherry Blossoms” (2008), which also starred Elsner — was released this year. She had also completed two television dramas and a feature film, “Hannes,” directed by Hans Steinbichler, to be released next year.
Although German obituaries lauded Elsner as the last of the country’s film divas, Levy recalled a different side to her: that of a team player who put the film before her own acting.
“An unusual energy, sly and paired with a childlike joy rested in her,” Levy wrote in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. “She enjoyed a laugh, was compassionate, thoughtful and was always in a sparkling exchange with people and the world around her.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.