Nastassja Kinski Biography

Nastassja Kinski (born 24 January 1961) is a German actress who has appeared in more than 60 films in Europe and the United States.

Kinski's starring roles include the title character in Tess (1979), for which she won a Golden Globe Award, and her role in Paris, Texas (1984), which won numerous awards. It is one of a number of films she made with German director Wim Wenders. The daughter of the actor Klaus Kinski, she began her career as a model.

Early life

Born in Berlin as Nastassja Aglaia Nakszynski, Kinski is the daughter of the German actor Klaus Kinski and his wife, actress Ruth Brigitte Tocki, She is a half-sister to Pola and Nikolai Kinski. Her parents divorced in 1968.

After the age of 10, Kinski rarely saw her father. Her mother struggled financially to support them. They eventually lived in a commune in Munich.

Career

Kinski started working as a model as a young woman in Germany. Actress Lisa Kreuzer of the German New Wave helped get her the role of the dumb Mignon in Wim Wenders film The Wrong Move. In 1976, while still a teenager, Kinski had her first two major roles: in Wolfgang Petersen's feature-film length episode Reifezeugnis of the German TV crime series Tatort. Next she appeared in the British horror film To the Devil a Daughter (1976), produced by Hammer Film Productions.

She has said that during this period, she felt exploited by the industry. In an interview with W Magazine, she said, "If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart."

In 1978 Kinski starred in the Italian romance Stay As You Are (Cosi come sei) with Marcello Mastroianni, gaining her recognition in the United States after New Line Cinema released it there in December 1979. Time magazine wrote that she was "simply ravishing, genuinely sexy and high-spirited without being painfully aggressive about it." Director Roman Polanski urged Kinski to study acting with Lee Strasberg in the United States and cast her in his film, Tess (1979).

In 1981 Richard Avedon photographed Kinski with a Burmese python coiled around her naked body. The image was marketed as a poster.

In 1982 she starred in Francis Ford Coppola's romantic musical One from the Heart, her first film made in the United States. She was also in the erotic horror movie Cat People. Dudley Moore's comedy Unfaithfully Yours and an adaptation of John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire followed in 1984.

Paris, Texas (1984), one of her most acclaimed films to date, won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival. During the 1980s, Kinski split her time between Europe and the United States, making Moon in the Gutter (1983), Harem (1985) and Torrents of Spring (1989) in Europe, and Exposed (1983), Maria's Lovers (1984) and Revolution (1985) in the United States.

Kinski has appeared in a number of American roles, including action movie Terminal Velocity, opposite Charlie Sheen, and Mike Figgis adultery tale One Night Stand.

In One From the Heart, director Francis Ford Coppola brought Kinski to the U.S. Texas Monthly described her as acting "as a "Felliniesque circus performer to represent the twinkling evanescence of Eros." The film failed at the box office and was a major loss for Coppola's new Zoetrope Studios.

Other work has included Somebody Is Waiting (1996), Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), John Landis' Susan's Plan (1998), The Lost Son (1999), and Inland Empire (2006).

Personal life

Sources differ but some say that in 1976, when Nastassja Kinski was 15, director Roman Polanski began a relationship with her. He was 43. In a 1999 interview, she said, "There was categorically no affair... There was a flirtation. There could have been a seduction, but there was not. He had respect for me."

In 2001, Kinski revealed that she suffered from narcolepsy in an interview for the The Daily Telegraph.

Marriage and family

In the mid-1980s Kinski met the Egyptian filmmaker, Ibrahim Moussa. They married on September 10, 1984. They have two children together; a son Aljosha (born 1984), and daughter Sonja Kinski (born 1986), who works as a model and actress. The marriage was dissolved in 1992.

From 1992 until 1995 Kinski lived with musician Quincy Jones. In 1993 they had a daughter, Kenya Julia Miambi Sarah Jones.

In a 1999 interview, Kinski denied that her father had sexually molested her as a child, but said he had abused her "in other ways." In 2013, when interviewed about the allegations of sexual abuse made by her half-sister Pola Kinski, she confirmed that he tried with her, but did not succeed. She said:

"He was no father. 99 percent of the time I was terrified of him. He was so unpredictable that the family lived in constant terror." When asked what she would say to him now, if she had the chance, she replied: "I would do anything to put him behind bars for life. I am glad he is no longer alive."

Selected filmography

• The Wrong Move (1975)
• To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
• Tatort: Reifezeugnis (1977)
• Passion Flower Hotel (1978)
• Così come sei (also known as Stay As You Are, 1978)
• Tess (1979)
• One from the Heart (1982)
• Cat People (1982)
• Exposed (1983)
• Frühlingssinfonie (1983)
• Moon in the Gutter (1983)
• Maria's Lovers (1984)
• Paris, Texas (1984)
• The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
• Unfaithfully Yours (1984)
• Harem (1985)
• Revolution (1985)
• Torrents of Spring (1989)
• Crystal or Ash, Fire or Wind, as Long as It's Love (1989)
• Humiliated and Insulted (1990)
• The Sun Also Shines at Night (1990)
• The Secret (1990)
• Faraway, So Close! (1993)
• Terminal Velocity (1994)
• Crackerjack (1994)
• The Ring (1996)
• Fathers' Day (1997)
• One Night Stand (1997)
• Bella Mafia (1997)
• Little Boy Blue (1997)
• Savior (1998)
• Playing by Heart (1998)
• Your Friends & Neighbors (1998)
• The Intruder (1999)
• The Claim (2000)
• The Magic of Marciano (2000)
• Time Share (2000)
• Quarantine (2000)
• An American Rhapsody (2001)
• The Day the World Ended (2001)
• Town & Country (2001)
• Blind Terror (TV 2001)
• Say Nothing (2001)
• Cold Heart (2001)
• Diary Of A Sex Addict (2001)
• .com for Murder (2002)
• Paradise Found (2003)
• Les Liaisons dangereuses (TV miniseries 2003)
• À ton image (2004)
• Inland Empire (2006)
• Sugar (2013)