Juliane Köhler
Juliane Köhler is an actor, born 1965.
The daughter of a puppeteer from Gottingen, Juliane Kohler took an unusually long route into film. From 1985 to 1988 she was in New York studying under Uta Hagen at HB Studio, with ballet instruction in Munich alongside it. Her first stage appearance came at Hanover's Lower Saxon State Theatre in 1988, and she spent 1993 to 1997 in the ensemble of the Bavarian State Theatre. She left that company because the shoot for Aimee & Jaguar collided with rehearsals for Das Kathchen von Heilbronn, and returned to Munich later for the Kammerspiele.
That film, in 1999, is where the screen career properly begins. As Lilly Wust she plays a woman in wartime Berlin whose life is dismantled by an affair she did not plan, and the performance depends on her being genuinely shallow before she can be brave.
Two years later came Jettel Redlich in Nowhere in Africa, a German woman transplanted to a Kenyan farm with entirely the wrong expectations, played as a slow change you cannot point to the moment of. Then Eva Braun in Downfall, the role most viewers outside Germany know her for, all determined gaiety inside a bunker.
She has worked steadily since, across German and international productions: Ruth Edelson in Adam Resurrected, Elke in A Woman in Berlin, Katrine in Two Lives, Diana Muller in Norway's The King's Choice, Mme Arpel in the French film France. What she does best is the woman keeping a surface intact while everything under it fails, and she does it without ever asking for sympathy.
Movies (9)
TV (3)
Where to start with Juliane Köhler
The performance to see first is Jettel Redlich in Nowhere in Africa. She arrives on a Kenyan farm with the wrong expectations and ends the film somewhere else entirely, and Kohler plays the change slowly enough that you cannot locate where it happened.
Aimée & Jaguar is the other essential one, the film that pulled her out of the theatre. Lilly Wust is the harder role of the two, because the character has to be unserious first and the actress has to resist making her sympathetic early.
Downfall is the famous one, and her Eva Braun is a small, strange performance inside a very loud film. After that, Two Lives and The King's Choice are the solid later work, A Woman in Berlin the bleakest, and France the odd one out, a small part in a film running at a completely different temperature.