After an acting course at Hamburg University of Music and the Performing Arts, where she was taught by Eduard Marks, among others, Evelyn Hamann started a career on the stage. She took on small roles at the Thalia Theater, and from 1968 her stage career took her to Göttingen, Heidelberg and Bremen, where she played Marthe Schwertlein in Goethe’s Urfaust. In 1976, Evelyn Hamann first became known to a wide television audience by acting with Loriot in a large number of comedy sketches. With her straight face and dry humour, she wrote television history as “Fräulein Renate” battling for love with her stuffy boss, “Fräulein Hildegard” in the legendary sketch where her devotee prances, having a noodle in his face, or as “Frau Hoppenstedt” proud of her “yodelling degree” which would give her something to build a career on when the children left home. In one famous scene, Die Englische Ansage (“The English Announcement”), Hamann plays a German television presenter summarising the plot of an English television series with a plethora of English “th”-sounds, a sound which does not exist in the German language. She struggles with names such as “North Cothelstone Hall” and “Lord and Lady Hesketh-Fortescue”, becoming more and more flustered as she struggles to say the words, eventually mispronouncing the German words as well.

Evelyn Hamann also had the most important female role in the Loriot films Ödipussi (1987) and Pappa ante Portas (1991). Hamann remained popular into the 1980s, playing the part of housekeeper Karsta Michaelis in the television series The Black Forest Clinic and later playing “Thea” in the weekly medical drama Der Landarzt (The Country Doctor). From 1992 she acted in the title role of the successful ARD television series Adelheid und ihre Mörder (Adelheid and her murderers) along with Heinz Baumann. Evelyn Hamann died during the night of 28 to 29 October 2007 in Hamburg, as a result of lymphoma, which had been diagnosed 10 months previously.