In her own words, the actress Anke Engelke never dreamed of becoming a comedian. “I started with radio and learned to be a journalist there. My first major role in the cinema was highly tragic,” said the 56-year-old in an interview with t-online.

When she came to the Sat.1 comedy show “Wochenshow”, she was already 30 years old. “I was originally cast as a newsreader. They then thought: wait a minute, now we have a woman here, so she can also play in the sketch. But I never did it to be funny, and I was never a comedian either my career aspirations.”

Actually, she wanted to be a teacher, said Engelke. “I also studied to be a teacher. Nobody in my family was a teacher. I find it interesting where that comes from for me. To this day I consider myself a teacher in disguise. Unfortunately, I didn’t complete my studies.” After the intermediate exams, she had to make a decision. She worked a lot for radio and missed a lot of seminars. “After many semesters in which I was hardly present, I then dropped out. That was actually quite embarrassing. But to this day I believe that what I do is relatively didactic. Everything I’ve done in the past 45 years I want to share and reflect. It’s just too beautiful and interesting what I’ve been offered and what I’ve learned.”