Alice and Ellen Kessler, Germany’s famed twin singer-dancers, died together at home in Grünwald near Munich on November 17, aged 89. Munich police described the deaths as a “joint suicide,” while the German Society for Humane Dying confirmed it was an assisted death; both accounts noted no foul play. The Kesslers launched their career in the 1950s and performed with Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte, becoming fixtures of post-war European variety television and stage revues.
Born in 1936 in East Germany, the twins fled to the West in 1952, were discovered by Paris’s Lido cabaret in 1955, and later became major stars in Italy; they also represented West Germany at the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest. In later years they remained public figures and expressed a wish to have their ashes interred together; reports following their deaths echoed those plans and their lifelong inseparability.
