It’s not often that the public associates two faces with one role. That’s the case with John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s musical Cabaret, however. One thinks of Liza Minnelli, who became famous worldwide with Bob Fosse’s filmed musical in 1972. And of Ute Lemper.

Born in Münster in 1963, Ute Lemper became the second Sally Bowles appearing at the Kit-Kat Club in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, reflecting the backdrop of the uprising Nazi party. Directed by Jérôme Savary, the musical was launched in Paris and Düsseldorf. Thus „La Lemper“ came to be a European star via France. In 1987 she was wildly acclaimed at the Théâtre Mogador in Paris for her ingenious and cunning cabaret girl, pronounced the discovery of the year, awarded the Molière theater prize as an upcoming artist, and celebrated as the new “Marlene.”

Her stage life before Cabaret? As a teenager, Ute Lemper made guest appearances in jazz and piano bars. After graduating, she attended the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. As a twenty-year-old, she got a part in the musical Cats, which Peter Weck directed at the Theater an der Wien, and meowed for 300 performances. After that she was engaged for the title role in the musical Peter Pan at the Theater des Westens in Berlin. Then she met Savary in Stuttgart and her path was paved.

A few years after Cabaret, she played Lola in Blauer Engel, like Marlene Dietrich once. Under Peter Zadek’s direction, again in Berlin, the piece was an enormous flop and Ute Lemper was heaped with scorn. All of a sudden her talent was only due to her legs, which Helmut Newton had photographed, by the way. Lemper turned her back on Germany—that had tradition. In this she also followed the example of Marlene Dietrich and Hildegard Knef.

Mundane, artificial, and not willing to be categorized, she, who calls herself a “singing theater person,” grew beyond the German show market. She cultivated her 1940s-face in the style of Veronica Lake, with clear-cut features, high-arch eyebrows, and as inscrutable as a mask. Thus she conquered Broadway. “If you can make it there, you can make it everywhere.” Those who make it in New York don’t have to take anything from anyone anymore. As Velma Kelly in the musical classic Chicago, she proved her worth. For a long time now she has resided in Manhattan with her second husband Todd Turkisher and her three children.

Ute Lemper’s career adds up to numerous international concert programs and tours, more than twenty albums, more than a dozen films with Norman Jewison, Pierre Granier-Deferre, Peter Greenaway, Dominik Graf, and Robert Altman, who gave her the spectacular scene as a very pregnant naked bride on the catwalk. The great choreographer Maurice Béjart created the ballet La Mort Subite for her in 1990.

Musically Ute Lemper has expanded her repertoire enormously. Sometimes her voice sounds metallic ringing and hard edged, then again jazz husky and honey warm. Thus everything is possible: chansons by Piaf and Prévert, Friedrich Holländer and Kurt Weill, Stephen Sondheim, or Hanns Eisler, as well as compositions by Michael Nyman (based on Paul Celan texts), or songs that Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and Philip Glass wrote for her. Musically La Lemper likes to dwell “between yesterday and tomorrow” as she titled one of her CDs.