Brigitte Mira

Brigitte Mira, who has died aged 94, was the incarnation of Berliner schnauze, the cheeky but disarming bluntness for which Berlin women are renowned. The last of Germany's popular stars spanning the 20th century, her range and versatility were enormous. Her show-business career covered eight decades in ballet, operetta, musicals, cabaret, film and television.

Yet fame came to her relatively late, when Rainer Werner Fassbinder cast her in Fear Eats The Soul, which won the international critics' prize at the 1975 Cannes film festival. In the film, Mira played Emmi, a 60-year-old widowed office cleaner in Munich who sets up home with a young Moroccan gastarbeiter (played by El Hedi ben Salem) after meeting him in a pub.

Fassbinder's sensitive handling of the unequal relationship, and his critical presentation of the responses of Emmi's family, turned the melodrama, which was based on Douglas Sirk's 1955 film, All That Heaven Allows, into a critique of racism and ageism. Mira's performance was widely praised; Fassbinder had made her a character actor, and people began to take her seriously.

She became a member of Fassbinder's team, and was to make eight more films with him, notably Lili Marleen (1981), and also the television mini-series, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Fassbinder died in 1982. "If RWF were still alive," she said later, "I would have an Oscar by now."

Mira turned to television, where her warm heart and sharp repartee made her a sought-after talk-show guest. She also became a soap star as the grandmother in the 140 episodes of Drei Damen Vom Grill (Three Grill Ladies, 1977-92), the saga of a family-run hotdog stand in Berlin.

Mira was the daughter of Siegfried Mira, a Russian concert pianist who settled in Hamburg and married a local woman. Her parents intended her to be a music teacher, but she preferred to train as a singer and dancer.

Her first professional role was as Esmeralda, in Smetana's The Bartered Bride, in Cologne in 1929. In the 1930s, she sang in operetta as a soubrette alongside artists of the calibre of Richard Tauber and Fritzi Massari in Bremerhaven, Graz and Kiel, before settling, in 1941, in Berlin, where she worked at the Rosetheater and the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

After the war, she appeared in Walter Felsenstein's productions of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne at the Hebbel- theater, and Johann Strauss's Fledermaus at the Komische Oper in East Berlin. Willy Schaeffer spotted her comic talent, and she was engaged at the Kabarett der Komiker, and later at the Insulanern, the leading cabaret venues. In the 1950s and 60s, she also acted in boulevard comedies.

Her first straight character part was in Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, in 1967. She was also appearing regularly on television. Then, in 1972, Fassbinder saw her in Peter Zadek's revue Little Man What Now?, and cast her in Fear Eats The Soul.

By 1998, she was appearing with Evelyn Künnecke and Helen Vita at the Bar jeder Vernunft, in Berlin, in Drei Alte Schachteln (Three Old Bags), a programme of chansons that the veteran trio toured all over Germany. Her two partners died in 2001. Mira's last stage appearance was in The Beggar Queen Of Moabit, at the Berlin Hansa-theater in 2000, when she was 90.

Mira was a Berlin original, despite having been born in Hamburg. Her life was quite untouched by political controversy, though she lived through the Third Reich on false papers because her father was Jewish.

By the end, she was a national treasure, the archetypal funny old Berlinerin with a heart. Her sense of humour, with a dash of sentimentality, stayed intact to the end. Her wit and irony were legendary. She was once asked on a talk show whether she chose her husbands by their star signs. "No-o-o," she responded, "I just took what came along."

Mira was married five times. Her last husband, television and film director Frank Guarente, died in 1983. She is survived by her two sons.

· Brigitte Mira, actor, born April 20 1910; died March 8 2005

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