Obituary: Alice and Ellen Kessler, entertainers

The secret of the Kessler twins’ success was perfect coordination. The identical German sisters first became famous in the 1950s as dancers and while they later also sang and acted it was their immaculate choreography, each step the shadow of its partner, that made them famous across Europe and the US.

It helped that they were blond and pushing 6ft tall but the synchronisation of their routines was what really caught the eye. One German newspaper called Alice and Ellen Kessler “the most famous four-legged friend in the world”, while they gave their autobiography the title One Plus One Equals One.

“We were born with discipline and with discipline we will say goodbye,” Ellen told the German broadcaster SWR in 2022. As they lived, so they died: by assisted dying. “Our desire is to leave together on the same day,” they told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera last year. “The idea that one of us might go first is very difficult to bear.”

Alice, the elder, and Ellen were born in Nerchau, near Leipzig, the daughters of Paul and Elsa Kässler. They had two older brothers who died young, and they described their father as an alcoholic bully. They had ballet lessons from the age of six, joining the Leipzig Opera at 11, learned acrobatics and the accordion. Aged 16, the twins fled East Germany for Düsseldorf, where their father worked as a mechanical engineer, and they were engaged as dancers at the Palladium revue theatre.

One night in 1954, Louis Clérico, owner of the Lido cabaret in Paris, saw the sisters and invited them to join the club he ran with his brother Joseph. They arrived not speaking any French and, having dropped the ä in their surname, became the youngest members of the Bluebell Girls, a troupe founded by the Irish dancer Margaret Kelly, who only wanted dancers over 5ft 9in.

Their costumes left little to the imagination. “We weren’t really dressed, but we weren’t undressed either,” Ellen said. “Our boss always kept an eye on where we were.”

The Lido attracted a stellar crowd, from the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Maria Callas, Sophia Loren and Burt Lancaster. The last had a one-night stand with Ellen but did not impress her. “I’d never been to bed with a statue before,” she said. John Wayne tried the same with Alice, asking an employee that he wanted to invite her for a drink. She politely told him that if he couldn’t ask her himself she wasn’t interested. They did go on a date with Elvis Presley, but found him insecure and shy.

The sisters worked at the Lido for five years, alongside a pair of English twins, Leila and Valerie Croft, but were quick to expand their horizons. The Clérico brothers took their dancers to Las Vegas and they performed on television with the likes of Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. In 1955, they made their debut in a German musical film, As Long as There Are Pretty Girls, and made 12 other German, Italian and French films, including the 1962 Biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah.

All that remained in light entertainment was to sing. In 1959, they represented West Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest in Cannes. The sisters were not happy with the original title of Today I Want to Stroll, changing it to Tonight We Want to Go Dancing. It did not impress the judges: they came eighth out of the 11 entries. They had some chart success as a trio with the singer Peter Kraus.

In 1961, they were poached by the Italian broadcaster RAI to perform on a new variety show, Studio Uno, singing the theme music, Da-da-un-pa. They were the first women to be allowed to show their legs on Italian television but only in opaque tights. A representative of the Vatican would attend rehearsals and complain if their outfits were revealing. Normally, the twins’ response was to go off with the designer for half an hour, not change a thing and return to dance to the Vatican’s satisfaction.

It was while recording at the RAI studios that they met the Italian actor Umberto Orsini, who had a 20-year relationship with Ellen. His holidays with her would be the longest time the twins ever spent apart. Alice was more fickle with her lovers. “Ellen was with a man for 20 years and I was with 20 in one year,” she said in 2008. Neither married.

The twins lived in Rome for 24 years, saying they were never as popular in Germany as elsewhere because their compatriots disliked perfectionism. Aged 40, the pair appeared in Italian Playboy, which reportedly sold out in three hours, but 10 years later they returned to Germany and lived the rest of their lives in Grünwald, near Munich, in a semi-detached house connected by a sliding door.

In 2014, they performed at the Sanremo festival in Liguria, saying they could still fit into dresses they wore in the 1970s, and a year later acted in the Udo Jürgens jukebox musical I Have Never Been to New York, taking turns to play the same character. Last year, they said they would like to be buried together in an urn, next to their mother and their dog. “United in death,” Ellen told Bild. “That’s how we would like it to be.”

Alice and Ellen Kessler, entertainers, born 20 August 1936, died 17 November 2025, aged 89

Photograph by Fred Lindinger/United Archives via Getty, Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images, Ullstein Bild via Getty Images, Helmut Reiss/United Archives via Getty Images, Luciano Viti/Getty Images