When Dean Martin announced the Kessler sisters’ appearance on his show in 1966, he remarked that he had been desperate to book them not just because the German-born dancer-singers were “so pretty and so talented”, but “also because they’re twins, that means there are two of them”. “They’re a double,” he added with a nod to his half-drunk crooner persona, “and there’s nothing I like more than a double”.
The two sisters, who died by joint assisted suicide earlier this week, also performed with Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Fred Astaire, but the American market never impressed them much. In 1964 they turned down a role in Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas for fear of being pigeonholed in American musical comedies.
Instead, it was in continental Europe that the duo truly left a mark on culture – in their native Germany but especially so in Italy, where they broke the mould of acceptable mainstream TV entertainment and paved the way for a new generation of empowered female performers.
Born in 1936 in Saxony, Alice and Ellen Kessler joined the Leipzig Opera children’s ballet two years after the end of the second world war and were due to move straight on to the attached dance school. But after escaping through the iron curtain to join their father in Düsseldorf in 1952, their breakthrough came in West Germany instead. They acted in a string of popular musical comedies, and in 1955 they were discovered by the director of the Lido cabaret theatre in Paris and became part of Margaret Kelly’s Bluebell Girls. They represented West Germany at Eurovision in 1959, an experience they later called ein misserfolg (“a flop”) – their entry, Heute abend woll’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 showbiz icons. They made their debut on Italian TV in the variety show Giardino d’Inverno (Winter Garden) in 1961, which evolved into Studio Uno 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-and-fancy nonsense chorus. Upon seeing them, screenwriter and playwright Ennio Flaiano chauvinistically described them as “two pairs of legs and one head”.
But beneath the glitz was serious craftswomanship. French cabaret, Austro-German operetta, their ballet training and Broadway all influenced their act as soubrettes – the French word used by Italians to indicate women who could sing, dance, and banter with equal confidence.
The emphasis was always on their foot- and legwork, and in culturally conservative 1960s Italy, showing exposed legs was still deemed scandalous to the point that they had to have them covered with thick, opaque tights. In his obituary for Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, journalist, author and TV history scholar Aldo Cazzullo noted that it was only after a couple of years’ worth of performances that the Kesslers were allowed to wear nylon tights.
This, in turn, provided commercial opportunities: hosiery titan Omsa promptly hired them for commercials in which they were joined by impish choreographer Don Lurio, in a segment aptly titled “Che gambe!” (“What legs!”). Their other big Studio Uno hit, 1965’s La notte è piccola, confidently affirmed their right to have fun: “The night is too short for us,” they sang. “There’s little time to dance and sing”.
While they did fewer variety performances in the 1970s, they posed in the nude, at the age of 39, for the January 1975 Playboy Italia issue, which achieved the 1975 equivalent of virality, outselling any previous issue. Their combination of song, dance and non-vulgar sensuality proved immensely influential for the leading showgirls of the 1970s and 80s, serving as the blueprint for Raffaella Carrà, the biggest and most enduring star to emerge from Italy’s variety show culture. Carrà bared her midriff like the twins had shown their legs; her hits Ma che musica and Felicità tà tà feel like spiritual successors of Da-da-un-pa and La notte è piccola; and the twins appeared to symbolically pass the baton to the next generation when they appeared as guests on an April 1974 episode of variety show Milleluci hosted by Carrà and vocal powerhouse Mina. In one segment, the four women sang about an aspect of their performance and their physiques that most appealed to male viewers. As Italian TV historian Rachel Haworth writes in her book The Many Meanings of Mina, this moment seemed to be both a product of the male gaze and a sly subversion, “as the women use their bodies to illustrate their objectification”.
Alice and Ellen remained inseparable even after they retired from show business. In the early 1960s, clad in top hats, shimmery bodices, they had sung Wir wollen niemals auseinandergeh’n (“we never want to be apart”), a 1959 schlager by Heidi Brühl. The original is an operetta-like waltz and a proclamation of endless romantic love, but the twins’ swing-like take emphasised their sisterly and artistic bond: “Wir wollen immer zueinandersteh’n / Mag auf der grossen Welt auch noch soviel gescheh’n”. “We always want to stand side-by-side / Whatever happens in the big wide world”.
In a 2024 interview they gave to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, they stated: “Our desire is to leave this world together, on the same day – the idea of one of us going first is very hard to bear.”
