Asta Nielsen (1881- 1972) Actress

"Let us consider the possibility that Shakespeare and Schiller were "disarmed" - the way I have been by the Swedish Censorship ... that all swords, daggers, knives and poison bottles were robbed them - then there would not exist a single theater play of theirs, which reached its third act."

"A marriage shall not be a sacrifice from any of the sides, but an aid for each others individuality. We do not marry to become one, but two, partly because the solitude feeling then otherwise would not be excluded."

Asta Nielsen is a Danish actress and known worldwide for one of the big stars of silent movies. She is primarily famous for her roles in melodramatic silent movies.
Asta Nielsen herself develops the female characters in the movies she plays in.
- Asta Nielsen is most interested in portraying the great impossible love and the emotional and quivering body, emphasizes women's roles torn from grief. She often depicts women who will die of love for a man. Like in "The Black Dream", 1911, and "Dora Brandes", 1916.
Asta Nielsen's female figures are often losers and victims, but she manages nonetheless to show a strength and a moral integrity that makes the women not just become puppets of a destiny game - they choose to go that way with an awareness of the conditions that underlies the inevitable tragic end.
Asta Nielsen's playing style is often very passionate and sexually challenging with a sense of liberty not seen in other actresses of the time. This results in her films often being censored or completely denied shown in cinemas. She is not afraid to respond and commend through public letters where she asks questions of censorship boards on artistic freedom.
Despite the fact that censorship committees find her movies amoral and demoralizing the people giving them bad manners with her quivering melodramas, the audience loves her acting style.
Asta Nielsen enjoy especially her success in Germany, where theaters are named after her ... She gets the nickname "Die Asta".

Asta Nielsen is a woman who is very conscious of her worth as a silent movie star. She sets her own fees, sometimes five times higher than the highest paid male lead. She is a strong, unorthodox and willful woman who goes her own way in all aspects of life. Not only has she a comprehensive control over her roles in the movies but also in her career; at one point she creates her own production company.

Asta Nielsen comes with a background in which the theater is not readily available, but she insists on doing audition for actor Peter Jerndorff. She is then admitted to the Royal Theatre Drama School.
In 1901 Asta Nielsen gives birth to her daughter Jesta. The public never gets to know who the father is. Asta Nielsen likes to act as a single mother. Asta's sister Joanna, who Asta has a very close relationship to, takes care of Jesta, while Asta is busy with her carrer in the theater.

From 1902 to 1905 Asta Nielsen is working at the Dagmar Theatre. But since many of the actors are dissatisfied with their roles, they go together to create their own theater. They call themselves "The Eight". They subsequently toured around in Sweden and Norway.
In 1908 to 1910 Asta Nielsen are employed at the New Theatre. But in 1910 she leaves the Danish theater to play in the movie "Abyss", written and directed by Urban Gad, who later becomes her first husband. Until 1916 Urban Gad instructs more than 30 of her films. The movie "Abyss" is a huge breakthrough for Asta Nielsen, but it is also a milestone in silent film history. By virtue of Asta Nielsen's style of play the movie becomes a significant and decisive step towards the development of film as an independent art form. She has from the beginning an almost intuitive sense of what she calls "the silent language" or "speaking silence" which requires an entirely different, far more controlled and less expressive acting technique than the theater expression, and she perfects a particular suppressed passion as you already see it in the "abyss".
Following this success she is signed to a German film company that produces much of the film, in which she acts.

In 1937 Asta Nielsen is summoned to a meeting with Adolf Hitler who’s offering to produce her own films, but Asta Nielsen refuses, she have had enough of Germany and the rise of Nazism. She travels back to Denmark.

Tone film has now taken over, but do not fit to her temperament. And she quits the movies. Her first and only sound film, "Unmögliche Liebe" is not a success. Instead, she begins to write her autobiography "The Tenth Muse" and she appears to be an excellent writer. She also writes short stories for magazines and periodicals, giving radio interviews and read up on the radio. In addition, she works with fabric collages, which she exhibits on several occasions. In 1964 her son in law dies, and her daughter Jesta commits suicide. The interviews she gives, and the letters she writes in the years after that circles around death and a joyless life.
Nevertheless, she rejects with great fighting spirit the film which Laterna Films with author Henry Stangerup instructs and produces about her, and she writes and directs then a new portrait film "Asta Nielsen", which is finished in 1968. In 1970 she marries the 18 years younger Christian Theede. Barely two years later she dies. She is buried in the unknown grave, where also her daughter and son-in-law lies. In 1998, a selection of her letters, "Letters 1911-71" is published under the editorial by Ib Monty.