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Denmark - Culture - CinemaDenmark [Main menu] - [Previous paragraph] - [Next paragraph] Bille August  Asta Nielsen, 1881-1972, Danish silent film actress and one of the
greatest of all silent film stars. In her first film, Urban Gad's Afgrunden
(The Abyss or The Woman Always Pays) in 1910, she made her name internationally famous. With the story of the nice girl who falls in love with a faithless circus artist and finally murders him, she laid the foundations for the erotic
melodrama, and her playing style showed a body language suited to
cinema, less theatrical than had been seen before. In 1911 she was
invited to go to Germany and there, partly for her own production
company, she played in more than 70 films, finishing with the sound
film Unmögliche Liebe (1932, Impossible Love).
She was equally adept at playing a flapper, an ageing woman, a harlot
and a proletarian, woman and man, Spaniard and Eskimo. Asta
Nielsen has become especially famous for her acting in films about
powerful and tragic love, in which her women characters suffer and die
or kill for unrequited love, for instance Die arme Jenny (1912, Poor Jenny).Anne Jerslev Polfoto © The Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs |
