Memorial Page for Andreas Hoppe

Andreas Hoppe (born 1 June 1960 in West Berlin; died on 17 August 2026) was a German actor and author. For twenty-one years he stood beside Ulrike Folkerts as Mario Kopper in the Ludwigshafen episodes of Tatort, Germany's long-running crime series — 57 cases between 1996 and 2018 that made the detective with Sicilian roots one of the most familiar figures of German television crime drama. Those who knew only the detective knew half the man: Hoppe wrote books about regional food, Sicilian cooking and the return of the wolves, lent his name to conservation projects, and remained the calm, attentive person his colleagues described.

From Tempelhof to Hanover

Andreas Hoppe was born on 1 June 1960 in West Berlin, the son of a plant engineer and a hairdresser, and grew up in the districts of Schöneberg and Tempelhof. From 1982 to 1986 he trained as an actor at the Hanover University of Music and Drama — in the same class as Ulrike Folkerts. "Together we dared to take our first steps towards the stage," she remembered decades later.

Years on stage

Straight after graduating in 1986 he joined the ensemble of Theater Bielefeld for three years; long afterwards he still recalled its production of Danton's Death with particular fondness. He then returned to Berlin, performing on several stages — from 1992 to 1995 he belonged to the ensemble of the Grips-Theater, the Berlin house famous for its theatre for young audiences.

Work in front of the camera began in parallel: a first small television role in 1986 as a police officer in the ZDF series Ein Fall für zwei, an appearance in Lindenstraße in 1990, the customs-investigator series Schwarz Rot Gold in 1991. Wolffs Revier followed in 1993, and in 1994 Peter Welz's feature film Burning Life, in which he played a detective.

"They were looking for a short, fat, doughy type"

That Andreas Hoppe would become a Tatort detective was anything but certain. At the casting for the new role at Lena Odenthal's side he was initially turned down:

"They were looking for a short, fat, doughy type who sweated a lot."

So he told it himself later — the Berliner, 1.93 metres tall, was informed he was better suited to playing villains. "Two Tatort episodes later they got back to me with the job after all," he remembered. On 6 October 1996 the moment came: in Der kalte Tod, Lena Odenthal's tenth case, Mario Kopper stood at her side for the first time — watched by 9.16 million viewers.

Mario Kopper, the half-Italian

The character Hoppe played for more than two decades carried his origins in his name: Mario Kopper, son of an Italian mother from Taormina on Sicily's east coast and a German father, raised in Ludwigshafen. Kopper loved Italian cars and antipasti, was a passionate cook, and in the squad room he was the empathetic listener who stayed dependable when things got uncomfortable — for a while he even shared a flat with Lena Odenthal. If the role felt authentic, it was partly because of how much of himself Hoppe put into it: the love of Italian cooking was his own.

Twenty-one years in Ludwigshafen

Between 1996 and 2018 Kopper investigated 57 cases at Odenthal's side. The role left Hoppe room for excursions: in 1998 he played an SEK squad leader in the Schwerin Polizeiruf 110 episode Live in den Tod — in an ensemble alongside Kurt Böwe and Irm Hermann —, in 2001 he crossed over for a guest role in the Munich Tatort of Batic and Leitmayr, and in 2004 he appeared in Der Bulle von Tölz opposite Ruth Drexel. There were also feature films such as Alaska.de and Kanak Attack (both 2000) and guest roles in series from Großstadtrevier to SOKO Leipzig.

An honour for the whole of Tatort

On 4 April 2014, at the 50th Grimme Awards in the Marl theatre, the Tatort format itself received the Special Honour of the German Adult Education Association. Ulrike Folkerts and Andreas Hoppe went on stage to accept the award on behalf of all 22 investigator teams of the series.

The same year brought Hoppe an honour of a very particular kind: the association of German hat retailers named him "Hat Wearer of the Year 2014" — only the second person so honoured, after the national football goalkeeper Nadine Angerer.

Kopper's farewell

In early 2017 viewers noticed something: in the experimental improvised Tatort episode Babbeldasch, Kopper barely appeared — in the film he was said to be in Italy. A few days later, on 2 March 2017, SWR made official what had long been rumoured: Andreas Hoppe was leaving the Ludwigshafen Tatort.

His final case became his character's farewell: Kopper, broadcast on 7 January 2018 and directed by Roland Suso Richter, caught the detective between loyalty to a childhood friend and an investigation into the Sicilian mafia organisation Stidda. In the end Kopper resigns from the force and joins his fiancée in Sicily — no on-screen death but a departure; the closing scene plays out on a beach. 9.99 million people watched, more than at his first case a good two decades earlier.

Hoppe made no secret of his disillusionment at the time:

"I grew up with Tatort and loved being part of it. But in recent years I no longer really got a look-in; my character was no longer being cared for. It stopped being fun."

The ending, he said, had been the broadcaster's decision — adding that he would probably soon have pulled the ripcord himself.

Alone among cucumbers

By then the second life of Andreas Hoppe had long begun. Prompted — as he told it — by a small, pale winter strawberry, he spent a year trying to eat only food from within a hundred kilometres of his three bases in Berlin, Ludwigshafen and Mecklenburg. At his country house in Mecklenburg he grew his own vegetables and traded the harvest with neighbours. The experiment became a book in 2009: Allein unter Gurken ("Alone among cucumbers"), written with Jacqueline Roussety.

Television picked up the theme: on 5 June 2013 SWR launched Der Kommissar im Kühlschrank ("The detective in the fridge"), a five-part documentary series in which three families from Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate ate only food from within 50 kilometres for 80 days — with Hoppe accompanying the experiment.

Sicily in the cooking pot

He finally approached his character's island as an author too: in September 2017 came Das Sizilien-Kochbuch ("The Sicily cookbook"), created with recipes and photographs by Cettina Vicenzino — a culinary journey to Syracuse, Taormina and Mount Etna, woven through with Hoppe's own stories. His publisher called it the fulfilment of a long-held dream: to travel to Sicily with "Kopper".

The wolf ambassador

His other great subject had four paws. From 2000 Hoppe served as a wolf ambassador for the German conservation association NABU, championing the wolves' return to Germany. For the documentary Schüsse in der Wolfsheide (2015) he investigated illegal wolf killings in Lusatia together with a species-protection expert. In October 2019 his book Die Hoffnung und der Wolf ("Hope and the wolf") appeared — for it he travelled to Canada and Romania, to the Bavarian Forest and to Brandenburg, talking to people who meet the wolf in very different ways: wolf researchers as well as shepherds and livestock farmers, whose worries he took seriously.

From 2013 he was also an ambassador for the BÄRENWALD Müritz bear sanctuary, helped transfer three brown bears to the refuge, and campaigned with the animal-welfare foundation Vier Pfoten for a ban on wild animals in circuses.

Later roles

After Tatort, Hoppe remained a busy actor: SOKO Potsdam, Der Lehrer and Endlich Witwer (2018), Frau Holles Garten (2019), Bettys Diagnose (2020), Ein Tisch in der Provence (2020/21), Daheim in den Bergen, Das Quartett and Der Zürich-Krimi (2021), a Rosamunde Pilcher film and Das Traumschiff (2022), and most recently Kroymann (2023). He also recorded audiobooks, among them crime stories by Agatha Christie, and toured with readings from his books.

His death

On the evening of 26 August 2026 his agency announced that Andreas Hoppe had died at the age of 66. According to its statement, which cited his family, he had died unexpectedly on 17 August. No cause of death was given. SWR bade farewell to its long-serving detective the same evening; director-general Kai Gniffke honoured him as an actor who had "enriched and shaped" the SWR Tatort for more than two decades — "approachable, credible and always with his heart in the right place".

Ulrike Folkerts said goodbye to her colleague and friend in personal words:

"I am deeply shaken that my colleague and friend Andi has died. … We went through thick and thin, looked out for each other, argued … It was a deep friendship … I am sad, Andi, it was far too soon, you were such a special guy! … Ciao Kopper."

What remains

Andreas Hoppe preserved a type of figure that has become rare in German television crime: the investigator who stands out not through toughness but through listening. For 57 cases Mario Kopper was the quiet heart of the Ludwigshafen Tatort. Anyone wanting to know who Andreas Hoppe was beyond the role will find him in his books: in the garden in Mecklenburg, at the stove with the recipes from Taormina, out with the wolves he championed so persistently. His manager called him a person "with a very special aura and with his heart in the right place" — and remembered a voice "you heard once and never forgot".