Biografia

Marthe Keller

Kicked off the film career of Jessica Chastain, by recommending her to Al Pacino. He says she told him, "There's this girl at Juilliard." He then cast Chastain in his play "Salome" and his long-awaited epic film Salomé (2013).
Her character in Black Sunday (1977), who pretends to be a nurse to poison someone, inspired Daryl Hannah's character in Kill Bill - Volume 1 (2003) during the hospital scene.
She has been directing operas since 1999.
Modeled to pay the rent while studying to become an actress.
Studied ballet as a child but stopped after a skiing accident at age 16. Changed to acting and worked in Berlin at the Schiller Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble.

One evening, a 35-year-old woman in tennis shoes and an old sweater rang the doorbell, stuck a foot in the door and said: "I want to kill you - your son, as well!" The cops arrested her - and told me she wasn't dangerous. I replied: "That woman had a gun. Next time, I'll phone you after I'm dead." I later learned she was a frustrated actress.
[on her role in Il maratoneta (1976)] You know, when I got the script, when I read the book, it was a kind of Mata Hari [role]. Though I think it's more interesting to have only a real relationship between persons. And I think Dustin Hoffman is too intelligent to have only a very beautiful lady. She must have something else. Not only beautiful, you know what I mean? And we changed it. We wrote other scenes. And it changed. We get enough of relationship. And now I like it. I like it well, this part.
[on her role in Il maratoneta (1976)] Once you have unfortunately an accent, which everybody knows I have, you get those kind of parts, which are sometimes a little bit the villain parts. Those characters are very interesting to play, like Lady Macbeth. But after a while, I stopped. I don't want it anymore. I don't want to be a bad girl. I'm not a bad girl - I'm blond. [laughs]
[on 'Un Certain Regard' at the Cannes Film Festival] In a first film, as in any first time, there is a purity, an astonishment that is never to be found again, an irrepressible desire to show us and to tell us something. [2016]