Asta Nielsen

In the beginning she played at different stages but the success didn't arise yet. This changed immediately when she met director Urban Gad (1879-1947) and cherished intentions in shooting movies. In 1910 their first common movie "Abgründe" came into being, which achieved an unexpected international success. Asta Nielsen got married with director Urban Gad in 1912 and shot together with him about 30 movies.

Asta Nielsen had a daughter, Jesta, born in 1901 outside of marriage. Jesta committed suicide in 1964 after the death of her husband.

Danish leading woman of German films who became one of the greatest stars of the silent era. A native of the Copenhagen suburb of Vesterbro, Nielsen was the daughter of a coppersmith and a washerwoman, both of whom died before Nielsen was fifteen. Her stage debut came as a child in the chorus of the Kongelige Teater's production of Boito's opera "Mephistopheles. " She studied at the Royal Theatre School of Copenhagen and embarked upon a stage career in her late teens. She toured Scandinavia and became one of the highest-paid and most popular stage actresses of her time and place. In 1909, director Urban Gad suggested that the silent screen would allow her to transcend her Danish language barrier, and she agreed appear in his film 'Afgrunden (1910)'. The film was successful and Nielsen was encouraged to continue in this new art form. A German distributor, Paul Davidson, invited Nielsen to Germany, where he was building a film studio which would eventually become Europe's largest--the Universum Film Union A. -G. (or Ufa). Nielsen and her director, Gad, whom she had married, went to Germany and spent the next quarter century there. She became one of the true superstars of the silent screen, a tragic heroine whose photograph during the First World War accompanied German and also British and French troops into battle. Among her notable films after the war was a version of "Hamlet, " which was not so much a Shakespearean film as it was an exploration of a then-current theory that the real Hamlet had been, in fact, a woman. Nielsen played the title role. She continued to play a wide variety of roles in Germany and occasionally in Denmark and Norway, never losing the respect and popularity she had maintained almost from the beginning of her career. She abandoned her film work just as sound was taking over the industry. Aside from one or two brief forays in talkies, her acting was thereafter confined to the stage.

Nielsen had four long-term relationships and was divorced twice. In 1912, she married the Danish film director Urban Gad following their move together to Germany in 1911 to build their own film studio. They were divorced by 1919 when Nielsen married the Swedish shipbuilder Freddy Windgardh. That marriage was short-lived and ended in divorce in the mid-1920s.

The couple Nielsen/Gad separated in 1915 and with it their cooperation came to an end too.

Because of her previous successes she became established as an international greatness long ago and she participated in producing her next movies. She shot "Das Liebes-ABC" (1916), "Dora Brandes" (1916) and "Der erste Patient" (1916). The remaining years of World War I she spent thereafter in Denmark.

Nielsen fell in love with the Russian actor Gregori Chmara whom she met through their mutual friend Georg Brandes. They began a long-term common-law marriage that lasted from 1923 until the late 1930s.

Nielsen began a relationship in the late 1960s with Danish art collector, Christian Theede, whom she had met through dealings of her own artwork. In 1970, at the age of 88-years-old, Nielsen married the 77-year-old Theede. Nielsen and Theede's outward joy for marrying at an elderly age was celebrated in the world press.