[1][5] She played on stage at the Landestheater Tübingen, the Wuppertaler Bühnen, Schillertheater and Schlosspark Theater in Berlin,[1] the Residenztheater in Munich and the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna;[3] her stage roles included characters by Shakespeare, Lessing and Kleist.

[2] She became popular again for a 1977 satirical schlager, "Das bißchen Haushalt ... sagt mein Mann [de]" (The little bit of housework ... says my husband),[3][8] after singing it in Dieter Thomas Heck's Hitparade show.

In 2010, at age 77, she portrayed Florence Foster Jenkins, "the worst opera singer in the world", in the comedy Glorious!

[5][9] After a brief marriage with film director Dietrich Haugk which ended in divorce in 1961,[8] Johanna von Koczian was married from 1966 to music producer Wolf Kabitzky,[4] who died in July 2004.

[4] Von Koczian moved to a nursing home in the Grunewald district in 2017, withdrawing from public life.