Ellen Richter was born Käthe Weiß in Vienna on 28 July 1891, the youngest of five children. Her parents were the Jewish tailor Jakob Weiß and his wife Rosa Weiß, both of Hungarian origin. In 1906, at the age of 15, she began drama studies at the conservatory of the Gesellschaft zur Musikfreude, also in Vienna, and two years later she made her debut on the stage of the city theatre in Brno (now in the Czech Republic), where there was a large German-speaking population at the time. Here she already performed under her stage name Ellen Richter. Two years later she moved on to the Residenztheater in Vienna. After a brief interlude at the Munich Künstlertheater in 2012, Richter moved to Berlin, where her roles at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz included Orestes in Jacques Offenbach's operetta "Die schöne Helena". It was also during this time that she met Willi Wolff, a dentist and a librettist, who wrote lyrics for the director of the Theater am Nollendorfplatz and became Richter's husband in 1915.    

But even before that, in 1913, Richter made her film debut in "Rechte des Herzens" alongside Paul Otto. Further appearances followed with leading roles in melodramas such as "Der Eremit" with Richter as a famous singer or the crime film "Das Gesetz der Mine" (1915), directed by Joe May. She also played leading roles as a series actress in numerous early dramas and crime films by the later highly successful director Richard Eichberg and his production company Eichberg-Film GmbH, including "Leben um Leben" (1916) as a scheming countess or "Schuldlos Geächtete" (1917), which, under the distribution title "Die im Schatten leben" (1917), deals with the tragedy of an illegitimate mother and her child and responds to the increased public interest in social topics. 

In the first seven years of her film career, Ellen Richter was already a sought-after silent screen diva, having appeared in over 30 films. Early on, audiences associated her name with wit and charm, with fearlessness and a sense of adventure.

In 1920, with the founding of the production company Ellen Richter-Film Käthe Wolff, Richter and her husband became a professional team, with Wolff taking over the production and overall artistic direction and, from 1922, often also acting as director and screenwriter, while Richter remained the star in front of the camera. Whereas before she had often been confined to the role of the "exotic", with her own production company she had the freedom to choose her own roles: Female detectives, artists and revue stars were among her favorite characters, she slipped into men's costumes and played with her roles. Again and again she portrayed famous women from history or heroines in great travel and adventure movies, for example in the three-part "Die Abenteuerin von Monte Carlo" (1921) and in 1922 in "Lola Montez, die Tänzerin des Königs" opposite Heinrich George. Many of her films were shot abroad, in North Africa, India or the USA, and featured athletic action scenes. In 1927 the operetta adaptation "Der Juxbaron" and the comedy "Kopf hoch, Charly!" were released, two movies in which the young Marlene Dietrich could be seen before her big breakthrough.

In contrast to quite a few other silent film stars, Richter was initially able to make the transition to sound film; in 1932 she founded Riton (Ellen Richter Tonfilm), once again in partnership with her husband. In 1933, however, with the rise of National Socialism and Hitler's seizure of power, Richter, like other Jewish artists, was banned from performing and her production companies were expropriated, "aryanized" and renamed. " Manolescu, der Fürst der Diebe," which premiered in Berlin in March 1933, was to be Richter's last film, her successful career cut short by Nazi repression.   

In 1935 Richter and Wolff returned to Vienna, from where they fled to Paris in 1938 after Richter was expelled from the Reichsfilmkammer, a government agency that regulated the film industry in Nazi Germany. In Paris Wolff, who had produced his last movie in 1934 - "Wer wagt - gewinnt. Bezauberndes Fräulein" starring Heinz Rühmann - was able to run a dental practice for a while.

Shortly after the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in June 1940, the couple fled again, first to Lisbon, Portugal, and from there, with the help of Ernst Lubitsch, to New York, where they arrived in December of that year. Again, Wolff was anxious to return to practicing dentistry and began studying to earn an American doctorate. In 1946, Richter and Wolff were granted American citizenship, but the following year, Willi Wolff died suddenly of a heart attack during one of the couple's trips to Europe.     

After her husband's death, Richter divided her time between America, Switzerland, and Germany. Ellen Richter died on September 11, 1969 at the age of 78 in Düsseldorf. She had never worked in movies again after the forced end of her career.

Despite her popularity at the time and a filmography of more than 70 films, Ellen Richter has long been one of the many women who have been marginalized and thus forgotten by film historians, but who played a decisive role in shaping and expressing the early years of cinema in all its branches. Only a fraction of the films in which she participated or which were realized by her production company have survived. It was only in the 2010s, with the growing interest in the role of women in film history and the concrete impulses of feminist film studies, that some of her films were discovered and restored in film archives. In the summer of 2019, the German Historical Museum Berlin and the Film University Babelsberg dedicated the international workshop "The Great Unknown - Ellen Richter and Popular Cinema in Germany 1913 - 1933" to her, which will also included an extensive retrospective of her films.