Lothar grew up with her mother in Eppendorf, studying drama at the Hochschule für Theater und Musik (School of Theatre and Music) in Hamburg.

[1] She worked with Austrian director Michael Haneke in four films, typically playing women in states of extreme physical or emotional distress.

In Funny Games (1997) she and Mühe played a bourgeois married couple who are terrorised, tortured and eventually murdered by two young intruders in their palatial country house.

Haneke also required Lothar to film multiple takes of difficult scenes (including one where she is forced to pray for her family’s life), until she reached the state of physical and mental exhaustion he wanted for the character.

First shown on television in Austria, the film was released theatrically in Germany, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada and the United States.

Lothar’s final film with Haneke was the Palme d’Or-winning period drama The White Ribbon (2009), an examination of repression and violence in a German village just before the outbreak of World War I. Lothar’s role as a midwife in an abusive relationship with the village doctor again showcased her affinity for playing anguished, masochistic women.

In 2006, Lothar and Mühe co-starred in Nicole Mosleh’s debut feature Nemesis, another portrayal of an estranged married couple in crisis.

[7] In his 2019 interview for the Criterion Collection, Haneke confirmed that Lothar had committed suicide, dying the day before the fifth anniversary of Mühe’s death.