German Films
German Films
German Films
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Nora von Waldstaetten (photo courtesy of <strong>German</strong> <strong>Films</strong>)<br />
ACTRESS PORTRAIT<br />
It’s a blazing summer day in Berlin. Nora von Waldstaetten, ice<br />
cool in white shorts and T-shirt, considers a deeply personal issue and<br />
decides that yes, she will try the cake after all! Now, if this were a food<br />
magazine, you would go on to learn how Ms. von Waldstaetten is a<br />
genuine gourmet, that she gets excited by genuine Wiener Schnitzel,<br />
pâté, ripe cheese, that she prefers savories to sweets (hence the brave<br />
decision to go for the cake), that we swapped recipes and restaurant<br />
tips, bemoaned the lack of decent Chinese cuisine in this city and so<br />
on for close to two hours! And then we remembered: we’re here to<br />
talk film. But don’t fret, it’s still all gourmet stuff!<br />
Every actor has their break-out role. For Nora von Waldstaetten it<br />
was Viktoria, the hot, psycho-killer schoolgirl in the Tatort episode<br />
Herz aus Eis (“Heart of Ice”), who carves a seemingly unstop pable trail<br />
through her classmates. Apart from sky-high ratings and piles of fan mail, von<br />
Nora von Waldstaetten was born in 1981 in Vienna/Austria.<br />
The family moved to Baden, also in Austria, when she was six, where<br />
she started taking ballet lessons as part of the Children’s Ballet Group<br />
of the Badener Theater. Having got the stage bug (“It was the best<br />
playground of all”), von Waldstaetten wanted to become a prima<br />
ballerina. At the age of twelve she was offered her “first, real acting<br />
job, playing a man!” and “realized acting was for me! I love it! Just love<br />
it!” Her youthful enthusiasm had to be curbed, however, until she<br />
graduat ed from high school in Vienna. She then moved to <strong>German</strong>y<br />
to study Acting at the University of Arts in Berlin, collecting her<br />
degree in 2006. Her film debut came with Jargo (2003), the next<br />
year she appeared in the renowned Tatort series and the film Low<br />
Profile (Falscher Bekenner), which screened in Cannes’ Un<br />
Certain Regard in 2005. 2007 saw her in the TV movie Meine<br />
Fremde Tochter and the feature film Tangerine. In 2008 she<br />
picked up speed, appearing in Julie Delpy’s The Countess,<br />
Parkour, the Tatort episode Herz aus Eis, which won her the<br />
Bunte New Faces Award, and Schwerkraft, which garner ed her<br />
the Best Newcomer Actress prize at the Max Ophuels Festival in<br />
Saarbruecken. Her 2009 credits include the TV movies Ein Fall<br />
fuer Zwei and Nachtschicht VII, as well as Olivier Assayas’<br />
monumental study of a terrorist, Carlos, which screened in Cannes<br />
in May 2010.<br />
Agent:<br />
Players Agentur Management GmbH<br />
Sophienstrasse 21 · 10178 Berlin/<strong>German</strong>y<br />
phone +49-30-2 85 16 80 · fax +49-30-2 85 16 86<br />
email: mail@players.de · www.players.de<br />
HAVING HER CAKE & EATING IT<br />
A portrait of Nora von Waldstaetten<br />
Waldstaetten created a classic, a Tatort killer the audience actually<br />
rooted for! Beautiful and viciously deadly, yet Viktoria still had to have<br />
a special something to create and maintain that audience fascination.<br />
“It was quite a journey to create the character,” von Waldstaetten<br />
explains, forking for the chocolate cake with the gooey center. “I<br />
need ed to stretch my own morals and ethics. I loved diving into her.<br />
I prepared for three months, reading books on manipulation and the<br />
psychology of killers. I always wanted to have a very clear break in her<br />
biography, to find some spot that hurt so much it legitimizes her<br />
actions within her logic. It was very important that she has a wound<br />
within, a certain brittleness.”<br />
Von Waldstaetten admits it was “quite a tough shoot. I felt like a chess<br />
player moving the characters as I wanted. Viktoria was so deep and so<br />
german films quarterly actress portrait<br />
3 · 2010 10