11.09.1881 – 24.05.1972
Actress, author
Asta Nielsen was one of the great stars of the silent film era. She began her career in the theatre. She was a strong, unconventional, and self-determined woman who brought to life a wide range of dramatic and tragic female destinies driven by boundless passion. From 1911, Asta Nielsen recorded a long series of melodramas in Germany, but she returned home to Denmark in 1936.
She was honoured by The New York Times as the greatest artist in silent film. As the only Dane, she has a section at the TV Museum in Berlin as well as a star in the pavement on the Walk of Fame, Berlin.
In 1945–46, she published her autobiography: The Tenth Muse. She wrote short stories for weekly newspapers and magazines and read on the radio. At the age of 86, with great fighting spirit, she rejected the film that Laterna Film, with the author Henrik Stangerup as director, had produced about her, and then wrote and directed a new portrait film herself, Asta Nielsen, which was completed in 1968. Asta Nielsen took up the fight and remained an independent woman throughout her life.
