Born Fritzie Sager, she was a native of Germany who immigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1937 and settled in Chicago in the 1940s. In 1944 she married aspiring theatre producer Bernard Sahlins, who cofounded The Second City comedy theatre and training center in 1959. Prior to the establishment of Second City, the Sahlinses worked together in the early 1950s at the Playwrights Theatre Club – which nurtured the early careers of such actors and directors as Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, and Ed Asner – and then, in 1956-57, at the Studebaker Theatre Company, whose company included Geraldine Page and Harvey Korman. The couple divorced in 1968.

After serving as co-chair of the Theatre Department, Fritzie continued to teach acting classes in the Columbia College Chicago Dance Department into the 1980s. Her other theatrical credits included directing the first production of David Mamet‘s The Duck Variations at the Body Politic (now Greenhouse Theatre Center) in Chicago in 1972. The Duck Variations was the first full-length play by Mamet, who taught at the Columbia College Theatre Department when Fritzie was co-chair. In the 1980s she was a mentor and director for the performance troupe Somebody’s Daughters, whose members – Anna Brown, Doreen Stelton, and Kiki Kathy Ciesielski – were her former students from Columbia College. Fritzie was also an accomplished expressionist painter whose work was exhibited at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and other venues.

Fritzie Sahlins died of cancer on March 9, 1991, at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center in Chicago. She was 66.