It is 35 years since the magnificent and monstrous director Rainer Werner Fassbinder died from a drugs overdose. His addiction to alcohol and cocaine was as widely known as his bisexuality, and his propensity for cruelly manipulating anyone who entered his orbit. Though he was just 37 years old at the time of his death, he had already made more than 40 features: most famously Fear Eats the Soul, a melodrama about a German widow who falls for an Arab immigrant more than 20 years her junior; Fox and His Friends, starring Fassbinder himself as a gauche carnival worker exploited by his boyfriend; and The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which a single-minded newlywed in the chaos just after the second world war claws her way to prosperity, declaring herself “the Mata Hari of the economic miracle”.

When Fassbinder wasn’t spearheading the New German Cinema along with Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, he was writing plays or mounting ambitious television series such as the 15-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz. His dominant theme was the manifestation of power at every level of society, whether between lovers, families or a country and its citizens.

His muse was Hanna Schygulla, who brought her enigmatic, haughty allure to 23 of his film and television works. Now 74, with a wild mane of grey hair, she has collaborated with directors such as Godard, Béla Tarr and Carlos Saura and was even a contender for the lead in Sophie’s Choice. But she only ever gets asked about one person. Seated in the window of an empty restaurant in west Berlin, she tells me: “It’s because I’m one of the survivors.” Her choice of words makes Fassbinder sound like a natural disaster. To some, that’s precisely what he was.

The pair first clapped eyes on one another in the mid-1960s when they enrolled at the same Munich acting school. They were in their early 20s, part of that wave of young Germans discontented with the response of the older generation to nazism. Schygulla was on friendly terms with a future member of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, while Fassbinder’s early plays challenged the commonplace fascism found in society. “He was against people being educated to do what they were told. So many people flipping out on Hitler suggested a strong tendency in Germany toward obedience.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fassbinder and Schygulla on the set of TV drama Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1979. Photograph: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

There was an instant, unspoken connection between them. “It suddenly became crystal clear to me that Hanna Schygulla would one day be the star of my films,” he wrote. “Maybe even something like their driving force.”

She found him curious. “My first thought was he looked Mongolian, not German,” she says. “He was extremely shy but also daring. During improvisations, his approach was always different from the others. There was never a cliché.” Fassbinder is rarely seen on screen without a leather jacket, a cigarette, a beer or all three, so I ask what he smelled like. She wrinkles her nose. “He had a strong smell about him. He smelled how he looked. Like a spotty rebel filled with angst.”

They were rarely apart from that point on. He cast her in his debut film, the bare-bones gangster movie Love Is Colder Than Death, in which he played a petty hood and she was his blank-eyed, doll-faced moll. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” she says. “We were just playing around.” The look and subject matter are pure early Godard but the numbed acting style that would characterise Fassbinder’s later films was already in place. “He never explained anything and his direction was never psychological. He was more like a choreographer. There were precise gestures and movements he would get us to do. If you were a little strained and not totally into it, he would like that because it seemed you were living a life in which you were not comfortable; it was not really yours. That’s how he felt.” Only once did he offer her explicit direction. “In one scene, he hits me. But because I knew what was coming, I would always flinch. So he said: ‘Imagine you like to be slapped.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hanna Schygulla at Cannes film festival in 2007. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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However, she was one of the few members of his repertory company to avoid being tricked, trapped or intimidated by him. “He didn’t torture me. He knew he could only get things from me if he made me feel he liked what I was doing.” Few were so lucky. Life was hell for Michael Ballhaus, who went on to become Martin Scorsese’s preferred cinematographer. Ballhaus worked with Fassbinder throughout the 1970s, beginning with the garish western Whity, where most of the problems arose from Fassbinder’s pursuit of his leading man and sometime lover, Gunther Kaufmann. On one occasion, the director threatened to slit his wrists if Kaufmann wouldn’t sleep with him. “He even went as far as borrowing a razor,” recalled the film’s producer Peter Berling. “But in the end he simply shaved.”

At the start of every day on Whity, Fassbinder would demand 10 cuba libres: nine to drink and one to hurl at Ballhaus. But the cinematographer stuck by him. “Working with [Fassbinder] was hard, both mentally and physically,” he once said. “He used to emotionally abuse me and also my wife, who was an art director on a few of his movies. I never understood his behaviour but I learned so much from him.”

The emotional casualties Fassbinder left in his wake were almost as numerous as his movies. Two of his lovers, El Hedi Ben Salem and Armin Meier, both of whom also acted in his films, later hanged themselves. Irm Hermann, who lived with the filmmaker for several years and worked with him almost as often as Schygulla, suffered emotional and physical abuse at his hands which drove her to try to take her own life three times. When she threatened to jump out of a window, he told her: “Go ahead.” At a group dinner, Fassbinder announced that he would sleep with her only if she would renounce her vegetarianism by eating a steak. She acquiesced but then vomited afterwards. “I said eat it, not puke it up,” he fumed. “If you want to make it with me, you’ve got to keep the meat inside you.”

Schygulla says she wasn’t present at that meal. But she witnessed plenty of similar behaviour. “It was painful to watch. I looked away a lot.” She says this softly, with a hint of shame, and suddenly her description of herself as a survivor starts to make sense. This is a woman, after all, who was delivered on Christmas Day 1943 by a doctor who happened also to be moonlighting at Auschwitz. She has described this as “like living with a secret crime or a corpse in the cellar”. I wonder if she is suffering from a form of survivor’s guilt. I wonder, too, whether the put-upon actors ever offered one another support or solidarity. “A little bit. Never in front of him. No one ever said, ‘Stop this behaviour or we’ll quit.’ It was like being in a laboratory that was set up to discover what man is like under pressure.”

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She fled the lab eventually. During the making of Fassbinder’s 1974 period drama Effi Briest, he told her all the projects he had lined up for them to make together. He even suggested putting her under a lifetime contract. “I felt too much like a puppet. I said, ‘Oh Rainer, give me a break, would you?’ That hurt him and he became distant.” Once the film was in the can, Schygulla hitchhiked across America while Fassbinder’s work-rate remained as relentless as ever. Eventually they were reconciled in 1978 for The Marriage of Maria Braun, arguably their fiercest film together, and certainly their biggest commercial success. “I wasn’t so keen on the story. I said, ‘Why does she have to die?’ He said, ‘Because she’s gone too far. If you go too far, there is no way to turn back.’” He would know.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, 1972. Photograph: Tango/Rex/Shutterstock

Their relationship took another knock after Schygulla discovered that Fassbinder had personally intervened to ensure she was paid less than her male co-star on his 1981 wartime melodrama Lili Marleen. “He must have thought, ‘That’s good enough for her.’” She was shooting a film in Mexico the following year when she received a message that Fassbinder had left phone messages for her. “I thought, ‘I’ll be in Paris soon, I’ll call him then.’” Not long after, he was dead. “He knew from the start that his heart was weak,” she says. “Before Love Is Colder Than Death, his doctor had told him to be careful. And then all that cocaine, all those pills. He was deaf to danger.”

She made it back to Germany for his funeral. “They played all his favourite music from Schubert to Janis Joplin, Kraftwerk to Pink Floyd. But the coffin was empty. They were still trying to determine the exact cause of death.” Has she visited his grave in Munich? “What for? It’s just a couple of bones. I have my corner in my apartment where I keep the portraits of those who belonged to me. He is there.” His legacy, she insists, is as vital as ever. “He could see the world through the eyes of a stranger and there are film-makers today who learned from that. Look at Moonlight — it’s about being stigmatised, being gay and black and poor. Fassbinder was always interested in the lives of outsiders and immigrants from the very beginning. He showed how we are all under the tyranny of values that are not even our own.”