[1] Giehse began her career in 1920, working with Tony Wittels-Stury in "Stage Society for Primitive and Expressionist Art: Acting".

On 20 May 1936, she married the homosexual English writer John Hampson to obtain a British passport and avoid capture by Nazis.

[3] She returned to Germany after World War II, and performed in theatres on both sides of the Iron Curtain, but mostly in her native Bavaria, until her death on 3 March 1975, three days before her 77th birthday.

In the mid-1970s, she returned to the Berliner Ensemble to perform several Brecht Evenings of the poems, plays, and writings of her lifelong friend and colleague.

In 1988, a commemorative stamp was printed in her honour as part of the Women in German history series.