Inseparable, sensual and confident, the Kessler twins were pioneers of variety show culture | Pop and rock

WWhen Dean Martin announced the Kessler sisters’ appearance on his show in 1966, he noted that he was desperate to book them not only because the German-born dancers and singers were “so beautiful and so talented,” but “also because they’re twins, so that means there’s two of them.” “They’re a couple, and there’s nothing I love more than a couple,” he added, referring to his half-drunk diva character.

The sisters, who died by joint suicide earlier this week, had also performed with Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Fred Astaire, but the American market did not impress them much. In 1964 they turned down a role in the Elvis film Viva Las Vegas for fear of being pigeonholed into American musical comedies.

Instead, the duo left a real mark on culture in continental Europe – in their native Germany, but especially in Italy, where they broke the mold of accepted mainstream television entertainment and paved the way for a new generation of empowered female artists.

Born in 1936 in Saxony, Alice and Ellen Kessler joined the Children’s Ballet of the Leipzig Opera two years after the end of World War II and were due to go straight to the attached dance school. But after escaping across the Iron Curtain to join their father in Düsseldorf in 1952, their breakthrough came in West Germany instead. They acted in a series of popular musical comedies, and in 1955 they were discovered by the stage manager of the Lido cabaret in Paris and became part of Margaret Kelly’s troupe, the Bluebell Girls. They represented West Germany at Eurovision in 1959, an experiment they later called “Experiment”. eye com. missrfolg (“Floundering”) – Their entry, Heute abend wol’n wir tanzen geh’n, (Tonight we want to go dancing) placed 8th out of 12.

It was their move to Italy in the early 1960s that turned them into true icons of the entertainment industry. They made their debut on Italian television on the variety show Giardino d’Inverno (The Winter Garden) in 1961, which evolved into Studio Uno in the same year. For Studio Uno, they danced and sang the opening theme tunes, most notably Da-da-un-pa, a typical show tune with a fun, groovy nonsense chorus. Upon seeing them, screenwriter and playwright Ennio Flaiano chauvinistically described them as “two pairs of legs and one head.”

But beneath the facade was serious craftsmanship. French cabaret, Austro-German operetta, and ballet and Broadway training all influenced their work Subrits – The French word that Italians use to refer to women who can sing, dance and joke with equal confidence.

The focus was always on their feet and legs, and in culturally conservative Italy in the 1960s, showing exposed legs was considered so scandalous that they had to cover them with thick, opaque stockings. In his obituary for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, journalist, author, and television history scholar Aldo Cazzolo noted that the Kessler family was not allowed to wear nylon stockings until two years after the shows.

This, in turn, opened up commercial opportunities: hosiery giant Omsa immediately hired them for commercials in which they were joined by villainous choreographer Don Lorio, in a segment titled “Chi Gumby!” (“What are the legs!”). “The night is too short for us,” they sang “The night is too short for us.” They confidently asserted their right to have fun. “The night is too short for us,” they sang. “There is little time to dance and sing.”

Although they performed fewer variety shows in the 1970s, they posed nude, at the age of 39, for the January 1975 issue of Playboy Italia, which achieved a 1975 equivalent of circulation, outselling any previous issue. Their combination of song, dance and non-vulgar sensuality proved a major influence on the pioneering showgirls of the 1970s and 1980s, serving as a blueprint for Raffaella Cara, the biggest and most enduring star to emerge from Italy’s variety show culture. Cara revealed her stomach as the twins showed off their legs; Her songs Ma che musica and Felicità tà tà I feel like spiritual successors to Da-da-un-pa and La notte è piccola; The twins appeared to symbolically pass the baton to the next generation when they appeared as guests on an April 1974 episode of the variety show Milleluci hosted by Carrà and vocal powerhouse Mina. In one clip, the four women sang about an aspect of their performances and bodies that appealed to male viewers. As Italian television historian Rachel Haworth writes in her book The Many Meanings of Mina, this moment seemed to be the product of the male gaze and subtle subversion, “as women use their bodies to articulate their objectification.”

Alice and Ellen remained inseparable even after they retired from show business. In the early 1960s, they wore top hats and sparkling waistcoats, and they sang Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh’n (“We Never Want to Be Parted”), a Schlager painting produced by Heidi Brühl in 1959. The original is an operetta-like waltz and a declaration of endless romantic love, but the twins’ swinging style emphasized the fraternal and artistic bond between them: “Wir wollen immer zueinandersteh’n / Mag auf dergrossen Welt auch noch soviel gescheh’n.” “We always want to stand together / No matter what happens in the big world.”

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2024, they said: “Our wish is to leave this world together, on the same day – the idea of ​​one of us being first is an idea that is difficult to bear.”