Nastassja Kinski life and biography

Nastassja Kinski is a German-born American-based actress who has appeared in more than 60 films. Her starring roles include her Golden Globe Award-winning portrayal of the title character in Tess and her roles in two erotic films (Stay As You Are and Cat People), as well as parts in Wim Wenders' films The Wrong Move; Paris, Texas; and Faraway, So Close!. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Kinski was widely regarded as an international sex symbol: Richard Avedon's photo of her, nude with a large python, was marketed as a poster.

The daughter of actor Klaus Kinski (with whom she had little contact after the age of 10) and sister of actress Pola Kinski, Nastassja (billed as Nastassia in the USA in the early 80s) was a teenager when she met and fell in love with director Roman Polanski, 25 years her senior. Under his spell, she went to the USA for six months to study "The Method" with Lee Strasberg. Then, Polanski put Kinski in her star-making role, of "Tess". In the film based on the Thomas Hardy novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", Kinski played a girl from a poor background whose fortunes rise and fall after she is thrust into "polite" society. The film established her and she furthered raised her profile by posing for photographer Richard Avedon, who shot a nude poster of the actress and a snake that became the rage of college dorm rooms.

Kinski moved into American films, such as Francis Ford Coppola's uneven "One From the Heart" and opposite Malcolm McDowell in "Cat People" (both 1982), both of which made her raw, reactive sensuality briefly the rage. But Kinski's free-spirited, sex-charged yet aloof screen persona did not click with US audiences. She seemed content to retain a low-key presence and appeared in films on both sides of the Atlantic. The same year she played pianist Clara Wieck in "Frulingssinfonie/Spring Symphony" (1983), Kinski starred in "The Moon in the Gutter" for French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, with whom she was linked romantically. But her performance--as a wealthy woman involved with Gerard Depardieu--was almost universally panned. She fared better with the critics as the wife in Wenders' "Paris, Texas", but that film was limited to an art-house crowd.

In 1984, she starred in two Hollywood productions, neither of which won widespread audience attention. Kinski was cast as the wife whom Dudley Moore thought was philandering in the unsatisfying remake "Unfaithfully Yours" and was alongside Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe in Tony Richardson's "The Hotel New Hampshire". She was miscast as the love interest to Al Pacino caught up into the colonial dispute with Britain in Hugh Hudson's box-office dud "Revolution" (1985). Most of her subsequent films in the 80s and into the early 90s were little seen in the USA including the American ones.

But Kinski's profile in American gossip columns and tabloids skyrocketed in the 90s when she gave birth and named Quincy Jones as the father of her daughter, Kenya Julia. Their relationship became fodder for tabloid reports and made Kinski more well-known than all her films combined. Her acting services were in greater demand and she scored a critical success as the skydiving student of Charlie Sheen's who appears to have died on her first jump--but has not--in "Terminal Velocity" (1994). Her work in US films then became more mainstream. She was the mother of a runaway teen who may be the son of either Robin Williams or Billy Crystal in the genial comedy "Father's Day" (1997). That same year, the busy actress co-starred with Ryan Phillippe and John Savage in "Little Boy Blue", a study of incest and dysfunction in a Texas family, and was opposite Wesley Snipes in Mike Figgis' study of marriage and infidelity, "One Night Stand".

In the mid-90s, Kinski also began to appear with some regularity on American TV. She was involved in a diamond heist in "Crackerjack" (HBO, 1994) and played a German war widow who flees to the USA to start life anew in "Danielle Steel's 'The Ring'" (NBC, 1996).

Filmography:

* The Wrong Move (1975)
* To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
* Tatort: Reifezeugnis (1977)
* Passion Flower Hotel (1978)
* Così come sei (aka Stay As You Are) (1978)
* Tess (1979)
* One from the Heart (1982)
* Cat People (1982)
* Exposed (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)
* The Sun Also Shines at Night (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)
* An American Rhapsody (2001)
* The Day the World Ended (2001)
* Town & Country (2001)
* .com for Murder (2002)
* Paradise Found (2003)
* À ton image (2004)
* Inland Empire (2006)

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