A luminous bold-featured, blonde Teutonic beauty, Hanna Schygulla met Rainer Werner Fassbinder while taking an acting class in Munich and began working with him at the Munich Action Theater, where he assembled the nucleus of his cinematic stock company. She appeared in nearly 20 features in 12 years for the workaholic director, her open-hearted sensuality burning brighter than the upper-class, intellectual alternative provided by another Fassbinder favorite Margit Carstensen. Providing the dramatic cornerstone of some of his finest films, Schygulla became established as one of the leading European actresses of her generation, and her facility with languages freed her to work in the idiom of different countries.
Schygulla projected sexuality as strength. In two 1969 films for Fassbinder, she played characters (a prostitute in "Love Is Colder than Death", a possessive girlfriend in "Gods of the Plague") who betrayed the men in their lives, and in his "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972), her insolent working-class model, confident in her ability to break hearts of either sex, used her looks to get ahead while refusing to surrender her independence. The director's "Effi Brest" (1974) married her to a controlling older man whose gentle reign of terror was not enough to prevent her from cuckolding him, a fact which when discovered unleashed all his Prussian fury, and "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (1978), which finally brought Fassbinder the acceptance he sought and confirmed Schygulla as his ideal actress, cast her as a self-made woman whose rise to prosperity paralleled that of postwar West Germany. Performances in his landmark TV epic "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980) and the feature "Lili Marleen" (1981), an attempt to cash in on the Maria Braun formula, rounded out their collaboration prior to the director's premature death in 1982.
Immediately post-Fassbinder, Schygulla worked with French director Jean-Luc Goddard ("Passion" 1982) but found considerably more success the following year, winning the Best Actress Award at Cannes for Italian director Marco Ferreri's "Story of Piera" and excelling in her portrayal of strong-willed characters in former Fassbinder colleague Margarethe von Trotta's "Friends and Husbands/Sheer Madness" and Polish helmsman Andrzej Wajda's "A Love in Germany". The friendship between her and another woman in "Friends and Husbands" alienated the men in both women's lives, and for Wajda she threw caution (and her reputation) to the wind to consort with a younger Polish POW. She acted in her first US feature ("Delta Force") and made the NBC miniseries "Peter the Great" in 1986, but her best work in English is undoubtedly her sinister maid for Kenneth Branagh's "Dead Again" (1991). Since then she has remained busy in European features, perhaps most notably Ivan Fila's "Lea" (1996) and as Magda Goebbels in Fernando Trueba's acclaimed "The Girl of Your Dreams" (1998).
Significant Others
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Companion: Jean-Claude Carriere.
Education
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Munich University, Munich, Germany, languages and literature
Milestones
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1945 With mother, fled to Munich when the Red Army approached Kattowitz
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1949 Met father (who had been held as a POW during WWII) for the first time at age five (date approximate)
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1968 Acted in the short The Bridegroom, The Comedienne, and the Pimp , written and directed by Jean-Marie Straub; Fassbinder played the pimp
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1968 Joined Munich Action Theater, where she worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (date approximate)
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1969 First films with Fassbinder as director, Love Is Colder Than Death (as a prostitute), Gods of the Plague (initial collaboration with actress Margarethe von Trotta) and Katzelmacher (film version of writer-director s first stage play)
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1970 Began seven-film acting collaboration with Margit Carstensen with Die Niklashauser Fahrt , co-directed by Fassbinder and Michael Fengler, and Fassbinder s Das Kaffehaus
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1970 Once again played a prostitute, the only character who does not exploit the title figure in Fassbinder s Whity , a tale set in America s antebellum South (but shot in Spain)
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1971 Reteamed with Fassbinder and von Trotta in Beware of a Holy Whore ; this time the whore was cinema
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1972 Explored her bisexuality in Fassbinder s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a sexually self-confident female who can negotiate social mobility and class difference through her looks; Carstensen starred in title role
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1974 Portrayed Fassbinder s Effi Briest , a woman married off to a Prussian merchant twenty years her senior; when her husband years later learns of an affair she had conducted, he challenges his rival to a duel and kills him, then divorced his wife (who soon dies)
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1975 Appeared in Wim Wenders Wrong Move , the second and least successful of the director s road trilogy
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1978 Played title character who exploits men to her success in The Mariage of Maria Braun , which confirmed her as Fassbinder s ideal actress
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1980 Acted in Fassbinder s monumental TV epic Berlin Alexanderplatz
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1981 Last feature with Fassbinder, Lili Marleen
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1981 Starred in Volker Schlondorff s Circle of Deceit , co-written by von Trotta
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1982 Appeared in Jean-Luc Goddard s Passion
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1983 Delivered a strong, heartfelt performance in Andrzej Wajda s A Love in Germany
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1983 Headlined Friends and Husbands , written and directed by von Trotta, a film detailing a friendship between two women which threatens to eclipse both women s relationships with the men in their lives
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1983 Won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her work in Marco Ferreri s Story of Piera
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1986 First US feature, Delta Force
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1986 Made American TV debut in the NBC mininseries Peter the Great
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1986 Portrayed Swedish songbird Jenny Lind in the CBS biopic Barnum , starring Burt Lancaster
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1987 Played the mother of the title character in ABC movie Casanova , featuring Richard Chamberlain
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1987 Starred in Forever Lulu , a Desperately Seeking Susan clone which marked the actress first time filming in the USA
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1991 Offered a wonderful turn as the sinister maid forever lurking and eavesdropping while painful emotions churned inside in Kenneth Branagh s noirish Dead Again
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1995 Joined stellar international cast including Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson and Erland Josephson in Waiting for Sunset
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1996 Acted in Ivan Fila s Lea , which showed well at numerous European film festivals and earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Foreign Film
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1998 Portrayed Magda Goebbels in Fernando Trueba s The Girl of Your Dreams