German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 580/3, 1919-1924. Photo: Art Film. Asta Nielsen and Gregori Chmara in Der Absturz/Downfall (Ludwig Wolff, 1923).
Danish silent film actress Asta Nielsen (1881-1972), was one of the most popular leading ladies of the 1910s and one of the first international film stars. Of her 74 films between 1910 and 1932, seventy were made in Germany where she was known simply as Die Asta. Noted for her large dark eyes, mask-like face, and boyish figure, Nielsen most often portrayed strong-willed passionate women trapped by tragic consequences.
Asta Sofie Amalie Nielsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the daughter of an often unemployed blacksmith and a washerwoman. Nielsen's family moved several times during her childhood while her father sought employment. Nielsen's father died when she was fourteen years old. At the age of eighteen, Nielsen was accepted into the acting school of the Royal Danish Theatre. During her time there, she studied closely with the Royal Danish Actor, Peter Jerndorff. In 1901, twenty-year-old she became pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, Jesta. Nielsen never revealed the identity of the father and chose to raise her child alone with the help of her mother and older sister. In 1902 she graduated. For the next three years, she worked at the Dagmar Theatre, then toured in Norway and Sweden from 1905 to 1907 with De Otte and the Peter Fjelstrup companies. Returning to Denmark, she was employed at Det Ny Theater from 1907 to 1910. Although she worked steadily as a stage actress, her performances remained unremarkable. Danish historian Robert Neiiedam wrote that Nielsen's unique physical attraction, which was of great value on the screen, was limited on stage by her deep and uneven speaking voice.
In 1909, director Urban Gad encouraged Asta Nielsen to become a silent screen actor and she starred in his Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910, Urban Gad). This film established from the beginning key components of her legend: scandalous eroticism and a uniquely minimalist acting style. Asta plays a music teacher lured away from her stolid fiancee by a sexy but faithless circus cowboy. In a startling sequence of sexual intensity, she lassos her boyfriend and does a lewd dance, bumping and grinding against him. This vulgar ‘gaucho-dance’ was what most viewers remembered, but critics of the time also applauded Asta's naturalistic acting. The film was a huge success so she was encouraged to continue. The following year Balletdanserinden/The Ballet Dancer (1911, August Blom) proved to be a success too. Nielsen and Gad soon married and then moved to Germany. In 1911 she was contracted to German producer Paul Davidson for $80,000 a year, then the highest salary for a film actress. In a Russian popularity poll of 1911, she was voted the world's top female film star, behind French comedian Max Linder and ahead of her Danish compatriot Valdemar Psilander.
In the next six years, Asta Nielsen played every conceivable kind of character in tragedies and comedies. In Die Suffragette/The Militant Suffragette (1913, Urban Gad), she is an English female liberationist whose beliefs force her to become violent, placing a bomb in Parliament. In Zapatas Bande/Zapata's Gang (1916, Urban Gad) she plays a highway robber. In the comedy Das Liebes-ABC/The ABCs of Love (1916, Magnus Stifter), she pretends to be a man and takes her wimpy boyfriend out on the town in order to "bring out the man in him." One of Asta's most interesting productions was Hamlet (1921, Sven Gade, Heinz Schall). Asta brings a subtle twist to her version not by playing a man, but by playing a woman disguised as a man, adding another level of gender complexity. Hamlet was based less on William Shakespeare than on a popular book of the time that said Hamlet was actually a girl forcibly raised as a boy in order to provide an heir to the Danish throne. At first, the effect is more puzzling than effective, but the actress's strategy becomes evident in sexually charged scenes between Asta/Hamlet and Horatio, who caress and coddle each other in what surely appeared to viewers of the time (as it does to modern audiences) as a gay tryst. Asta brilliantly imparts the gender-unstable nature of the character in these scenes with Horatio and others with Fortinbras, whose encounters with Hamlet are also clearly coded as gay. The actress's effortless creation of these subtle, sympathetic homosexual tableaux gives a tremendous vitality to this production. The fact that the film was truly hers — being the first film she made with her own production company — shows just how daring and modern she was.
Nowadays Die Freudlose Gasse/The Joyless Street (1925, G.W. Pabst) is the film for which Asta Nielsen is best known, In the original prints, Asta, playing an impoverished woman who resorts to prostitution and murder, was one of two equal-time female leads. Ruthlessly cut for American release, the film suddenly became a Greta Garbo vehicle. Fortunately, the print has been restored and Asta triumphs in the role of the increasingly unbalanced Marie. Nielsen continued as a legend of the screen in Germany in films like Dirnentragödie/Tragedy of the Street (1927, Bruno Rahn) and her only sound film Unmögliche Liebe/Crown of Thorns (1932, Erich Waschneck). After the Nazis came to power she was offered her own studio by propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. Understanding the implications well, she left Germany for good in 1936, settling in Denmark where she was a private figure in her later years.
Asta Nielsen wrote articles on art and politics and a two-volume autobiography and became an acclaimed collage artist. She directed her first film at 86. After a film about her life did not meet with her approval, she set to work on the project herself. The result was a work of art. At the beginning of the 1960s, 83-year-old Asta Nielsen had to come to terms with the most severe blow of her life: Her daughter Jesta committed suicide following the death of her husband. Finally, at 88 years of age, Asta Nielsen married her fifth husband, Christian Theede, an art dealer 18 years her junior and the great love of her life. The two enjoyed their travels together so much that they decided to leave their fortune to a foundation to fund trips for the elderly.
Sources: Gary Morris (Bright Lights Film Journal), Luise F. Pusch (FemBio), Wikipedia, and IMDb.