ABSTRACT
Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) was one of the earliest and one of the greatest film stars of the silent screen. Until very recently, she has also been one of the least known. Her first film The Abyss (Afgrunden) dating from 1910 immediately propelled the 29-year-old Danish actress into the orbit of international film-making. Based in Berlin, she made a total of 74 films over the next 22 years, founded her own film company, Art-Film in 1920, and worked with directors ranging from her first husband, Urban Gad, to Ernst Lubitsch, Leopold Jessner and G.W. Pabst. Her fame was made in romantic film melodrama, but like most stars she appeared in several other genres embodying characters as diverse as the suffragette (Die Suffragette, 1913), the eskimo (Das Eskimobaby, 1917), Prince Hamlet (in Hamlet, 1920)—her first independent film)—and Maria Magdalena (I.N.R.I., 1923). Before the First World War, a director of her German production company, Internationalen Film-Vertriebs-Gesellschaft (founded 1911), estimated that Asta Nielsen was seen by 2.5 million cinema-goers every day in about 600 cinemas (Diaz quoted in Seydel & Hagedorff 1981:50).
