Yes, she is still recognized on the street. “But it has to be people who are over 50 years old. Every now and then we get into a very nice conversation. Back then, when we were 100 percent famous, it was rather exhausting,” says Eva Maria Klinger. By back then, the TV legend, who turns 80 tomorrow, means the years from 1967 to 1984, when the Viennese-born woman worked as one of the first announcers for the ORF.
“Was considered blonde and sweet”
It was June 27, 1967, when Klinger won the voice talent competition required for the job. “I was a nice, obviously relatively telegenic girl of 22. Soon I was always considered blonde and sweet. Of course, that bothered me because I thought I could think and talk too.”
“}”>
Image: ORF
But in the past, no one at ORF was interested in that. “Women were cleaning ladies, secretaries or speaking dummies.” In 1970, Klinger, who was introduced by a magazine after the competition in July 1967 as a “blonde art student” and the new “screen girl”, received her doctorate in theater studies and German studies from the University of Vienna. The title of her dissertation was: “Attila Hörbiger. Development of a character actor”.
Before her studies, Klinger had toyed with the idea of studying acting at the Reinhardt Seminar. “But I shouldn’t have told my mother that I wanted to,” she once said. She thought that with a doctorate, “everyone would be a bit more respectful in the workplace.” But it didn’t change anything.
When she married the pharmacy owner Viktor Kainzmayer, entire photo series were published that document her celebrity status to this day. In one report she was called the “blonde TV mailbox lady Dr. Eva Maria Klinger (in reference to the ORF format “Postfach 7000″, which she presented, ed.)”. She married very quickly, she said shortly before her birthday, and only later realized “that I definitely wanted to be financially independent and have a job. I had to buy this freedom back then, literally.”
The marriage, which produced her son Christoph, later ended in divorce. However, the women’s movement brought about a change. “There were then female editors,” especially in the cultural sector. Klinger later became one of them and then some. In addition to her work as a speaker, she worked in Studio Wien and produced her first articles, including cultural ones. After proving herself as a designer, she joined the Ö1 cultural editorial team in 1984. In 1992 she returned to TV and presented the magazines “Achtung Kultur” and “K 1” and created numerous articles, documentaries and portraits. In 2015, shortly after his death, she dedicated the biography “Nie am Ziel” to Helmuth Lohner.
