Inspiring Women : November 2020

First day on set for Mr. Bird
the next day in a café and he gave me the script for Mister Bird. Dietmar Wunder, Michael’s best
friend, played the male lead and I was the female lead. We worked extremely well together, so well
in fact, that we eloped one year later on April 16, 1997! The beauty of eloping is that we both
remember every single moment of the ceremony, to this day. There was nothing and no one to
cloud the experience …
We moved to Berlin in June 1997 and have been here ever since.
When I arrived in Berlin, I was determined to learn to speak
German. It was similar to my experience with American
English when I moved to America. Being able to
communicate in the language of the country that you live in
is essential. When I was still at NYU I took off a semester and
worked at a children’s theater that put on plays in German. I
didn’t know a word of German, but I convinced the theater
director that I would be a great intern. I would sit at my desk,
for hours with the plays and a German-English dictionary
(this was the 90s, there was no computer), and go through
the play word for word and translate everything. Intro to
German 101. I had no German formal education whatsoever.
Then when I arrived in Berlin, I had been determined to go to
a German language school and learn to speak German. But
after three days at a language school I decided I couldn’t do
it, I was too old. I was in my mid-20s, married, and wanted to
work as an actress. The other students wanted to learn how
to order beer etc.; ordering beer wasn’t my priority.
With my husband Dietmar
So instead of going to school I went to different types of
cafes in Berlin and listened to people speak in German,
writing everything down phonetically for myself. I would go
home and talk to my husband about it and he would correct
me if something was wrong. I stopped speaking English and
asked my German friends to only speak German to me. I did
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