Franka Potente

At 49 years old, Franka Potente has this physical status:

Franka Potente (born 22 July 1974) is a German actress and singer.

She appeared in After Five in the Forest Primeval (1995), for which she received a Bavarian Film Award for Best Young Actress.

She made her breakthrough in 1998 when she portrayed the titular role in the acclaimed action thriller Run Lola Run, for which she received a BAMBI Award for Best Actress.

For her role in the television film Opernball (also 1998), she received more critical acclaim and a Bavarian Television Award nomination.

Potente made the transition to Hollywood with her role in Blow (2001), and the Bourne Supremacy (2004).

In Che (2008), she portrayed communist revolutionary Tamara Bunke and psychologist Anita Gregory in The Conjuring 2 (2016).

Anatomy (2000), The Princess and the Warrior (2000), Creep (2004), Romulus, My Father (2007), Eichmann (2007), and Muse (2017) are among her notable films.

Potente has appeared in the television series Copper (2012–2013), Taboo (2017), and now, Claws.

She has appeared in the second seasons of American Horror Story (2012) and The Bridge (2014).

Early life

Potente, the elder of two children, was born in Münster, West Germany, and raised in nearby Dülmen. Hildegard's mother, Hildegard, is a medical assistant, and her father, Dieter Potente, is a teacher. Her Italian surname derives from her great-grandfather, a Sicilian slater who migrated to Germany in the 19th century. Potente spent a few months as an exchange student in Humble, Texas, a suburb of Houston, Texas, where she was 17 years old.

Personal life

Potente married American actor Derek Richardson in mid-2012 following his friendships with German film director Tom Tykwer and American actor Elijah Wood, among others. The couple live in Los Angeles and have two children, born 2011, and 2013.

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Career

Potente attended the Otto Falckenberg School of Performing Arts in Munich after finishing high school in Germany. Potente began acting outside of school hours and appeared in her first film in the 1995 student film Aufbruch. She was then discovered by a casting agent and appeared in Nach fünf in Urwald (After Five in the Forest Primeval), directed by Hans Christian Schmid, then-boyfriend. Anna, a seventeen-year-old girl who is in search of freedom in a urban setting, ran away from home with a child who has a crush on her. On April 25, 1996, the film premiered at the 1995 Hof International Film Festival and opened in German theaters. For her role in this film, she was given the Bavarian Film Award for Young Talent in 1996. She completed her last year of study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan.

Potente returned to Europe and worked in German and French films; she made her breakthrough with 1998's Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) after meeting director Tom Tykwer in a café. Her job, rather than being written for her persona, was that of a woman who has to obtain 100,000 Deutsche Mark in ten minutes to save her boyfriend's life. The arthouse drama, which cost the arthouse an unprecedented and commercial success, earned US$14.5 million worldwide. Variety called her appearance "heroic, tenacious, feared, and vulnerable all at once," while eFilmCritic.com called her casting a "smart pick." She appeared alongside Teemu Aromaa in Downhill City (1999), a small-scale drama starring Finnish director Hannu Salonen, and Bin ich schön?

She starred in the German-language horror film Anatomy (2000) as a medical student who gains a place in a privileged Heidelberg medical school, where she reveals a horrific plot perpetrated by a shadowy Anti-Hippocratic institution. The film was a box office hit in Germany, grossing US$10.5 million domestically, and Variety wrote of it: "Boasting a tough young German actress Franka Potente (Run Lola Run) Anatomy is scary, sometimes horrific, widescreen fun that presses all the right buttons." Screames at the local [box office] and the year's best German photo so far, this is obviously latenight/fantasy fest farewell that may well be a cult product on half-inch and possibly even theatrically." She appeared in The Princess and the Warrior, directed by Tykwer, her Run Lola Run producer, in 2000. She portrayed a psychiatric hospital nurse who after a near-death experience, she enters a friendship with an enno former soldier (Benno Formann, also her co-star in Anatomy) who has lapsed into criminality in the film. Critics loved the independent film, and eFilmCritic said Potente "proves her versatility as an actress here with a much more subdued cast, but it is also capable of delivering powerhouse emotional scenes," although the consensus of review-aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes is "More slow-moving than Run Lola Run" features a frank character. She has been nominated for the European Film Award and the German Film Award for Best Actress.

Potente's first English-language role was as an airline stewardess who becomes engaged to cocaine smuggler George Jung in the biographical crime film Blow, alongside Johnny Depp. Mixed critiques of the film, however it earned US$83.2 million worldwide. Leo Fitzpatrick and Selma Blair produced the controversial independent film Storytelling (2001), a film editor. It premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and was limited to a select few countries. Potente's appearance in The Bourne Identity (2002), co-starring Matt Damon, received a lot of attention from fans. She portrayed a European woman who grows closer to the titular character, a man suffering from severe memory loss, and a man looking for his authentic identity within the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a clandestine clandestine conspiracy. On its debut, a scathing critical reception welcomed the film, and it was budgeted at US$60 million. She appeared in the American films All I Want (2002) and I Love Your Work (2004), as well as in the German film Blueprint (2003).

She appeared in the German horror film Anatomy 2 (2003) for a brief period of time, and she appeared in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), which earned US$288.5 million around the world. In 2004, she appeared in the British-German horror film Creep as a woman trapped in the London Underground overnight and discovering a hideously deformed killer lurking in the sewers below. Despite mixed reviews, the film earned US$3.2 million in UK cinemas. "The performances are fine, especially Potente, who avoids screaming queen clichés by making her character remarkably unlikeable, especially in her early scenes, and the fact that she is German is, of course, a coincidence."

Potente appeared in the German coming-of-age drama Elementarteilechen (Atomised), based on Michel Houellebecq's book Les Particules élémentaires and directed by Oskar Roehler. Der Tollkirsche Ausgräbt was written and directed by the author, who was also released in 2006. She appeared with Eric Bana and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the Australian drama film Romulus, My Father (2005), about a couple's struggle to raise their son amid a lot of adversity. She was nominated for the Best Lead Actress award in Australia's Film Industry Awards for her role. Potente's three-episode recurring arc in the FX drama "The ruthless godmother of L.A.'s Armenian mafia" began in May 2007. She appeared in Eichmann (2007), a biographical film describing Adolf Eichmann's interrogation.

Potente played Tamara Bunke, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Che (2008), a two-part biopic about Argentine Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. During an interview with Vulture magazine, she described the film as "fully epic and [...] very touching." The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, received a critical reaction despite earning US$40.9 million globally. Potente was a "local actor" who went "serious figures come and go, diverting the plot without revealing much of an effect, according to the New Yorker, who called her role as a "small actor" and said the actress "seems utterly uncomfortable in every scene." In 2009, she appeared in the House television series two-part episode "Broken."

Potente shot Shanghai, Thailand, on American neo-noir film Shanghai, extending production into August 2008. On June 9, 2010 in China, and on October 2, 2015 in North America, the film, set in the 1940s Chinese spy world, was released in North America. She was the leading passenger in the Laconia tragedy in 2011. The two-part television film premiered on BBC Two in January 2011.

Potente appeared in BBC America's first original scripted series Copper as a shrewd Prussian businesswoman and the madam of a brothel in 1860s New York City during the American Civil War. The show debuted on August 9, 2012, and it was the network's biggest debut in the network's history. It was later revived for a second season, but following its end, the BBC announced its cancellation. Potente made a two-episode appearance in American Horror Story: Asylum as a woman who claims to be Holocaust victim and diarist Anne Frank.

Potente was invited to appear on the second season of the FX series The Bridge as Eleanor Nacht, a "fixer" for the cartel. Anita Gregory, a German-British parapsychologist who investigated the Enfield Poltergeist case in the late 20th century, returned to the big screen in the horror movie The Conjuring 2 as a real-life German-British parapsychologist who investigated the Enfield Poltergeist case in the late twentieth century. It was discovered by the Hollywood Reporter that she was "curiously sidelined for a large portion of the film," but that it became Potente's most widely circulated film with a global gross of US$320.3 million. She appeared in the second season of the Canadian supernatural drama Dark Matter as a "calculated and stead Chief Inspector," and in 2017, she was cast in a supporting role in the BBC period drama series Taboo alongside Tom Hardy.

Los Angeles – Berlin was released in September 2005, based on Potente's corresponding with colleague Max Urlacher during his time in Los Angeles. Potente's second book Kick Ass – An Alternative Workout, co-written with her personal trainer Karsten Schellenberg, was released in May 2009. In August 2010, her first collection of stories, "Zehn," was released.

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