Rainhard Fendrich

Fendrich's mother was a Sudeten German while his father's family originated from Serbia. His father was a mechanical engineer, his mother a model.[1] He has a brother, Harald Fendrich, who is six years younger than him and also a musician who played the bass guitar in his band and is now part of WIR4 (Ulli Bäer, Gary Lux, Harry Stampfer).[2] At the age of ten, Fendrich was sent to a Catholic boarding school, where he lived until the age of 17. At the boarding school he was an altar boy and sang in the choir. His piano lessons were cancelled because he was too bad at mathematics.[3] According to his own statements, he thought he was "chubby" and not very attractive as a child.[4] When he got a guitar at the age of 15, he taught himself the chords and also began to write lyrics. Frustrating experiences with girls at that time find their expression later, for example in the songs Cyrano (1991) or Frieda (2001). He dropped out of law school in order to finance acting and singing lessons by working various jobs.

In 1980, Fendrich performed in the musicals Die Gräfin vom Naschmarkt, in 1982 in Jesus Christ Superstar, Chicago (Billy Flynn, 1998), and he played Jeff Zodiak in the musical Wake Up, which he co-wrote with Harold Faltermeyer (and which failed) in 2002 (all of those in Vienna, Austria). He has appeared in numerous Austrian and German movies.[5][6][7][8]

As an entertainer, he followed Rudi Carrell in the ARD TV show Herzblatt,[9] was the first host of Die Millionenshow, the Austrian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and for a while had his own TV comedy show, Nix Is Fix, produced by ORF and ARD.[10]

Fendrich received the Austrian Golden Romy award for TV entertainment.[10] In 1994, 1995 and 2000, he was nominated for the Amadeus Austrian Music Award four times before winning it in 2002. Austrian NEWS magazine readers voted him "Best Entertainer of the Decade" in same year.[11]

Donauinselfest, Vienna, 2007

In 1997, he gathered his friends, the Austrian singer-guitarists, Georg Danzer and Wolfgang Ambros for a beneficial concert to benefit homeless people. Their success was overwhelming, and the three individualists showed up on stage as Austria3 from that day, until they decided to stop that project in 2006. However, at Georg Danzer's comeback concert in Vienna on 16 April 2007, they met again for a few songs, and even "thought" in public about re-uniting in 2008.[12] This can not happen, as Danzer died of lung cancer on 21 June 2007.[13]

The concert on Donauinselfest which Fendrich gave "instead and for Georg Danzer" who a few weeks before the event had to refuse because of his rapidly progressing disease, attracted 200.000 fans on 23 June 2007.[14]

Fendrich was married to Andrea Sator from 1984 to 2003, with whom he has two sons. Their daughter died of a viral disease in 1989 at the age of 17 months.[15]

When Fendrich was found to have bought cocaine in early April 2006 in the course of police surveillance of a dealer ring, he confessed and claimed to have been using it for 15 years. Immediately afterwards, the artist went through voluntary withdrawal and has since participated in anti-drug campaigns, but was sentenced to an unconditional fine of 37,500 euros in May for possession of cocaine and the (later largely abandoned) "passing on of drugs".[16]

On December 4, 2010, Fendrich married his long-time girlfriend Ina Nadine Wagler in Berlin. Their son was born on March 10, 2011.[17] After the couple separated in 2012,[18] the divorce took place in November 2016.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rainhard Fendrich.

• Rainhard Fendrich at IMDb
• Rainhard Fendrich discography at MusicBrainz