Brigitte Grothum was born in Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt, to an engineer father and a teacher mother, and was the niece of German aviation pioneer Hans Grade. At the age of fifteen, she moved to Berlin and completed her matriculation at the Ricarda Huch School.
Initially, she had aspirations of becoming a pianist, but a broken finger put paid to that. Instead, she took acting lessons under Marlise Ludwig and Herma Clement and made her stage debut at the Tempelhofer Zimmertheater at the age of nineteen. Since then, she has been almost continuously engaged at various theatres, mainly in Berlin, but also in Frankfurt and Zurich.
From 1987, she added to her reputation as a stage director/producer, beginning with her adaptation of Jedermann by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Her contributions to the theatre earned her the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2000.
In films, Grothum had an early lead as the titular heroine in the equestrian wartime drama Das Mädchen Marion in 1956. She was then cast as Grethe Weiser's daughter in the comedy Lemkes sel. Witwe in 1957 and Elisabeth Bergner's in the family saga Die glücklichen Jahre der Thorwalds in 1962.
Her main breakthrough came opposite the eccentric Klaus Kinski in the Edgar Wallace thriller The Strange Countess in 1961. She appeared in two more Wallace adaptations, The Inn on the River in 1962 and The Curse of the Yellow Snake in 1963. Her roles on the small screen have included the Dürrenmatt adaption of Romulus der Große in 1965, the three-part Francis Durbridge miniseries Ein Mann namens Harry Brent in 1968, and guest appearances in episodes of popular crime shows like Tatort in 1970, The Old Fox in 1977, and Der Kriminalist in 2006.
In addition to her work on stage and screen, Grothum has also been a prolific voice-over actress, dubbing for, among others, Diana Rigg, Lee Remick, Barbara Eden, Angie Dickinson, Diane Keaton, Carol Lynley, and Yvonne De Carlo.
Grothum has been married twice. Her second husband, whom she married for fifty years, was the orthopedist Manfred Weigert, with whom she had two children, actress Debora Weigert and production manager Tobias Weigert.
