The first of my German heroines here. Fassbinder is of course a genius but I couldn't imagine any other actress being cast in these films and making them come alive the way she managed to do.
Hanna Schygulla met Rainer Werner Fassbinder while taking an acting class in Munich and began working with him at the Munich Action Theatre.
Fassbinder casted her in "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant" (1972), as an insolent working-class girl, confident in her ability to break hearts of either sex, using her looks to get ahead while refusing to surrender her independence.
It was her role in "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (1978) which blew me away and, which finally brought Fassbinder the acceptance he sought and confirmed Schygulla as his ideal actress, he cast her as a self-made woman whose rise to prosperity paralleled that of postwar West Germany. In fact, the more successful she becomes, the more ruthless she becomes. Perhaps one of the few anti-feminist New German Cinema films?
She's in other Fassbinder films too of course and she's in Wender's Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Movement) but it's her role in The Marriage of Maria Braun which will stay stamped in my head for ever more(first picture above). She was perfectly, ever so slightly wooden and fitted Fassbinder's haughty, vaguely grotesque role amazingly well. She is so synonymous with Fassbinder for me, it's as if they were meant to meet. Despite his amazing talent, these films would have been a lot poorer without her and no doubt her strong character was an asset, he was a spoiled, tempestuous queen to work for by all accounts.
Hanna Schygulla (born 25 December 1943)
2 lip schticks:
Hello RE, nice blog! I've never really got into Fassbinder but I agree that Hanna Schygulla takes his films somewhere else. In fact, her performance is about the only thing I remember about The Bitter Tears and Maria Braun. Mind you, I do have a memory like a sieve...
Great to have another Hanna fan dropping by. She was in many more Fassbinder films too, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Effi Briest, to name two. She's as synonymous with NGC as oversized specs and big hair.
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