By Tanja May and Eileen Primus
She bravely fights the disease: Actress Muriel Baumeister (51) has breast cancer.
She’s been fighting it for about a year. At the end of August 2022, BILD knew about it, Baumeister showed himself quite openly in Berlin in Prenzlauer Berg at the time, accompanied by her little daughter. According to BILD information, she was open about it last summer on the set of the ZDF series “Stubbe” and got a wig for the shoot in front of the camera.
She has also been showing her short hair on Instagram for a few months.
Now Muriel is talking to the magazine “Bunte” for the first time about cancer, showing up on the cover with short hair. And tells how aggressively this raged in her body.
They are sentences that touch. The mother of three says: “I am absolutely confident and can say that I have done everything I could to face this cancer.”
What did she take upon herself? “I’ve had antibody therapy, chemotherapy, surgery – and I’m still doing radiotherapy at the moment. I’ve now spent almost a year of my life on this.”
A year full of ups and downs – and full of fears.
She felt the cancer herself
“One morning, as I almost always do, I was lying in my bathtub at 6:30 a.m. and (…) felt a relatively large lump on my left breast,” says Baumeister about the day in spring 2022, which changed everything.
And further: “I got dressed, took my daughter to school, took deep breaths to calm myself and drove to my gynecologist the same day. He sent her to an oncologist who said, “Get used to the idea that you have breast cancer.”
When the cancer diagnosis was there, Baumeister “collapsed” and found support with her ex-husband (her son’s father). How bad the cancer diagnosis was last summer is illustrated by these words: “A year ago, in July, nobody was sure that I would be sitting here like this today.”
Muriel Baumeister on December 17, 2022 with a hat and wig, here she was already in the middle of chemotherapy
Photo: picture alliance / AAPimages/Timm
The actress describes the last few months as “probably the most difficult time of her life”. So intense that she almost couldn’t stand the chemotherapy with the bad side effects.
Baumeister says: “The chemo was hell on earth for me. (…) Everything else in my life, including alcoholism, was a pony farm. (…) After the 5th cycle, which was before Christmas, I wanted to stop. My son persuaded me to continue.”
Fortunately. Because she survived, she gets her last radiation therapy on Maundy Thursday. Metastases had not formed.
She is now looking to the future with hope: “I always try to be positive”. Her grandmother taught her her life motto at a young age, Baumeister said in an interview with BILD in 2019: “Get up, straighten the crown, move on”.
Baumeister has three children who stand by Mom in the difficult times: son Linus (29) from his marriage to actor Rainer Strecker (57), daughter Frieda (16) from his relationship with actor Pierre Besson (55) and daughter Ava ( 8), whose father is not publicly known.