"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,"
Born in 1936 in Saxony, Alice and Ellen Kessler joined the Leipzig Opera children's ballet two years after World War II and escaped through the Iron Curtain to join their father in Düsseldorf in 1952. They acted in West German musical comedies, joined the Bluebell Girls in Paris after being discovered in 1955, and represented West Germany at Eurovision in 1959, placing eighth with Heute abend woll'n wir tanzen geh'n. They declined a role in Elvis's Viva Las Vegas in 1964 to avoid typecasting. Their move to Italy in the early 1960s made them television icons who reshaped mainstream entertainment. They performed with Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Fred Astaire. They died by joint assisted suicide.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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