Alice and Ellen Kessler, identical twin sisters from Germany whose tightly choreographed song-and-dance routines wowed nightclub and variety show audiences around the world, died on Monday at their home in Grünwald, a suburb of Munich. They were 89.
Their death, by suicide, was confirmed by the German Society for Humane Dying, which provided assistance with the process.
Beginning as dancers at the famed Lido cabaret in Paris in 1955, the Kessler twins were part of the golden age of the trans-Atlantic nightclub circuit, performing on their own and alongside headliners like Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Fred Astaire.
As singers, they recorded a number of hit songs in West Germany in the early 1960s, as part of a trio with the singer Peter Kraus. In the United States, they made regular appearances on television programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Red Skelton Hour.”
But their greatest success came in Italy, where they moved in 1961 and helped usher in a TV revolution. They made a splash as the first female performers allowed to show their legs on camera — albeit in opaque tights — signaling an abrupt turn toward increasingly risqué programming on Italy’s formerly conservative small screen.
They appeared in at least 12 films, made in Italy and Germany, usually in small parts, as background dancers or as comic relief. One of their more prominent roles was in “Erik the Conqueror” (1961), a low-budget Viking epic directed by Mario Bava, in which they played vestal virgins.
The Kessler sisters were constantly together, onstage and off. They practiced their synchronized routines endlessly and insisted on sitting for interviews together — even answering questions in unison.
“We were always working,” they said during an interview with the newspaper Die Zeit in 2016. “We are perfectionists.”
They were among West Germany’s first pop-culture exports after World War II, and their statuesque features made them a paparazzo’s dream as they emerged, one after the other, from a limousine at film premieres and fashion shows.
They never married or had children. Boyfriends came and went. Ellen briefly dated the American actor Burt Lancaster, and Alice dated the French singer Marcel Amont.
They were on the cover of Life magazine in 1962; in 1975, they appeared on the cover of the Italian edition of Playboy.
“We were feminists, but without thinking about it,” they said in a 2024 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “From the age of 15, we started earning our own living. And we’ve always been independent. Perhaps, in the end, we became a little dependent on each other.”
Alice and Ellen Kaessler — they dropped the “a” early in their careers — were born on Aug. 20, 1936, in Nerchau, a town in central Germany. Alice was delivered first, and Ellen followed about 30 minutes later.
Their father, Paul, was a mechanical engineer; their mother, Elsa, managed the home. Early on, their parents encouraged their artistic talents, and at 11 they enrolled at the renowned ballet school at the Leipzig Opera.
Their father, in particular, pushed them hard, but he was an unstable presence in their lives. An alcoholic who abused his wife, he eventually left them, and East Germany, for the West.
The experience gave the sisters a life mission: to become successful enough to buy their mother a home of her own. Eventually, they did.
It also put them off marriage and family.
“We had already decided as children against the idea of marriage,” they wrote in their 1996 autobiography, “Eins Und Eins Ist Eins” (“One Plus One Is One”). “Men really never had a chance.”
In 1952, they applied for a tourist visa to visit West Germany and never returned. They moved to Düsseldorf, where they performed at the Palladium, a nightclub. Three years later, Pierre-Louis Guérin, the director of the Lido, saw them onstage and offered them a contract to perform in Paris.
There, they became part of the Bluebell Girls, a dance troupe based at the Lido. The work was grueling — two shows a day, seven days a week — but it forced them to hone their skills, and it got them noticed.
After living in Rome for decades, they returned to West Germany in 1986. At their home in Grünwald, they had separate living quarters with a sliding door in between.
“Generally, we each take care of our own house, but at midday we meet for lunch,” they told Corriere della Sera. “One day, Ellen cooks; the other, Alice.”
They continued to perform, though less often. In 2009, they appeared with the SWR Big Band, a jazz ensemble based in Stuttgart, Germany, and in 2015 they had lead roles in “Ich War Noch Niemals in New York” (“I Have Never Been to New York”), a jukebox musical.
They do not have any immediate survivors.
In recent years, the sisters spoke openly about their desire for euthanasia, in the event that one of them became gravely ill. Earlier this year, Ellen had a stroke.
“Our desire is to go away together, on the same day,” they told Corriere della Sera. “The idea of one of us going first is very hard to bear.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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