Margit Carstensen
Also Known As: not available
Biography: Margit Carstensen (29 February 1940 – 1 June 2023) was a German theatre and film actress, best known outside Germany for roles in the works of film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Carstensen was born and raised in the northern German city of Kiel. Upon graduation from the local high school in 1958, she studied acting at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. This education led to her first stage appearances in Kleve, Heilbronn, Münster, and Braunschweig. In 1965, Carstensen began a four-year engagement with the German Playhouse in Hamburg. In 1969, she gained a local profile for her work in the Theater am Goetheplatz in Bremen, where she first met director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She then worked under his direction in a comedy by the 18th-century Venetian Carlo Goldoni, The Coffee Shop (which was recorded for television in 1970), bringing her national attention in West Germany. She subsequently played the role of serial murderess Geesche Gottfried in the premiere of Fassbinder's own play Bremen Freedom (also televised, in 1972), and then in the title role of his Henrik Ibsen adaptation Nora Helmer (televised in 1974) derived from A Doll's House. Outside of theatre, Carstensen played leading roles in the Fassbinder films The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), her best-known role for him; Martha (1974), analysing a traditional marriage in a contemporary setting; Fear of Fear (1975); Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (1975); Satan's Brew (1976); Chinese Roulette (1976) and Women in New York (1977). She also appeared in episodes of two Fassbinder television productions: Eight Hours Don't Make a Day (1972), and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). From 1973 to 1976, Carstensen held a steady acting engagement in Darmstadt. In 1977, she moved to West Berlin where she performed on the highly regarded Staatliche Schauspielbühnen. In 1982, she moved to Stuttgart in order to work with director Hansgünther Heyme, where she appeared in a series of plays directed by him. During this time, Carstensen also worked in international film productions, such as Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981) and Agnieszka Holland's Angry Harvest (1985); the latter was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. By the late 1980s, she had developed ongoing working relationships with German directors Werner Schroeter, Christoph Schlingensief, and Leander Haußmann. For the 2003–04 season, Carstensen appeared in the Vienna Burgtheater, in the premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's play Bambiland under the direction of Schlingensief. During the 2007–08 season Carstensen assisted with the Austrian-German TV documentary Mr. Karl – A Person for People, directed by Kurt Mayer. In 2016, she was still on television, appearing in the long-running series Tatort. Carstensen received many awards in her career. Among these were the 1973 German Film Awards (Gold), for her acting in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and the 2002 Bavarian Film Award, for her acting in Scherbentanz. In 1972 she was chosen by the German Film Critics Guild as Best Actress of the Year. In 2019, she was awarded the Götz-George-Preis for her life's work. Description above from the Wikipedia article Margit Carstensen, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Kiel, Germany
Birthday: February 29, 1940
Deathday: June 01, 2023
Adult: No
Gender: Female
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Known For:
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Overview: Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1972-10-05
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Martha
Overview: After the death of her abusive father, lonely librarian Martha finds herself caught up in a strange, sadomasochistic relationship with a monstrous husband whom she begins to suspect may be trying to murder her.
Genres: TV Movie Drama Thriller
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1974-05-28
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Agnes and His Brothers
Overview: Focuses on three very different siblings, all searching for happiness. Hans-Jörg is a sex addicted librarian, who is interested in young students. Werner is a successful politician with a dysfunctional family. Agnes, a trans woman, works as a table dancer in a night club. The three brothers just have one thing in common: their longing for a happy life.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2004-10-13
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Possession
Overview: A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.
Genres: Horror
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1981-05-27
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Chinese Roulette
Overview: A husband and wife lie to each other about their weekend travel plans, only to both show up at the family's country house with their lovers.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1977-02-23
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Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven
Overview: After a worker kills a superior and commits suicide, each of his family members attempts to forge a path forward in life.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1975-07-01
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The 120 Days of Bottrop
Overview: An eccentric homage to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder days of German filmmaking.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1997-11-06
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Satan’s Brew
Overview: A famous poet who hasn't written a word in two years unconsciously plagiarizes the work of Stefan George, while dealing with several mistresses, his dim-witted brother, and a murder investigation.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1976-10-07
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Fear of Fear
Overview: After having her second child, a German housewife suffers from post-partum depression before inexplicably falling into a continually misdiagnosed mental state, befuddling her relatives.
Genres: TV Movie Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1975-07-08
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It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine.
Overview: Paul, a man suffering from cerebral palsy, lives an unfulfilled life in a nursing home. Sitting in his wheelchair, he fantasizes about a life in which people understand him, women find him irresistible, and he is be a force to be reckoned with. He places this imagined self in four different sexual fantasies, each with a different woman.
Genres: Drama Horror
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-11-21
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100 Years of Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Führerbunker
Overview: On 30 April 1945, dictator Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, and prominent members of the Third Reich live out their final hour in the Führerbunker.
Genres: Comedy Drama History War
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1989-02-18
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The Third Generation
Overview: A wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.
Genres: Comedy Crime Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1979-05-30
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La moitié de l'amour
Overview: Unable to possess Ivy in reality, Adrian organizes himself so as to know everything about her, to possess her story. Like the viewer, Adrian will be an involuntary detective, witness to a passion.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1985-08-01
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Tenderness of the Wolves
Overview: A German serial killer preys on boys and young men during the so-called years of crisis between the wars. Based on the true story of Fritz Haarmann, aka the Butcher of Hanover and the Vampire of Hanover.
Genres: Horror Crime Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1973-07-12
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Terror 2000
Overview: Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...
Genres: Comedy Horror
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1992-10-30
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Finsterworld
Overview: The film tells different stories in a kind of parallel Germany about love, affection and hatred.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2013-10-17
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Bremen Freedom
Overview: A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends. (synopsis written by Will Gilbert)
Genres: Drama TV Movie
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1972-11-12
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The Coffee House
Overview: Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffee house and discuss their problems.
Genres: TV Movie Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1970-05-18
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Manila
Overview: Due to a delayed flight a group of German flight passengers have to wait in the hall of the airport of Manila. The crowd is quite mixed, ranging from an cultivated east German teacher couple up to sleazy sex tourists. As the waiting prolongs, more and more aggressions and long repressed behaviors shed their way to the surface.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2000-06-29
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The Ancestress
Overview:
Genres: TV Movie
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1971-12-20
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Angry Harvest
Overview: In the winter of 1942-43, a Jewish family leaps from a train going through Silesia. They are separated in the woods, and Leon, a local peasant who's now a farmer of some wealth, discovers the woman, Rosa, and hides her in his cellar. Leon's a middle-aged Catholic bachelor, tormented by his sexual drive. He doesn't tell Rosa he's seen signs her husband is alive, and he begs her to love him. Rosa offers herself to Leon if he'll help a local Jew in hiding who needs money. Leon pays, and love between Rosa and him does develop, but then Leon's peasant subservience and his limited empathy lead to tragedy. At the war's end, a ray of sunshine comes from an unexpected place.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1985-02-20
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Die wilden Fünfziger
Overview:
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1983-09-23
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Hands off Mississippi
Overview: Full of anticipation, ten-year-old Emma goes on vacation to her grandma Dolly in the country. Once there, however, the girl learns that old Klipperbusch has died - and his money-hungry nephew Albert is already in the process of converting the inherited estate for profit. And anything he can't use for this is thrown out without further ado. At least Emma manages to save Klipperbusch's beloved mare Mississippi from the slaughterhouse at the last minute: she persuades her grandmother to buy the horse from Albert. Emma is now a proud horse owner. She is all the more surprised when Albert turns up at her door one day and desperately wants Mississippi back. It's clear to Emma and her friends that this guy can't be up to no good...
Genres: Family Adventure Comedy
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2007-03-22
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The Niklashausen Journey
Overview: Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.
Genres: Drama TV Movie
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1970-10-26
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Mister Karl
Overview: A documentary about the life of Karlheinz Böhm from his film career to his charity activities in Ethiopia.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2008-03-30
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Women in New York
Overview: The main characters in this film are wives of rich men who have nothing to do because they have staff – like the cook, the maid, the hairdresser, the manicurist, the governess, the teacher, the tailor etc. – who work for them. Naturally, the wives themselves do not pursue careers, they depend on their husbands’ money. This is why most of their thoughts revolve around the husband. And because the husband only appears as “the” man, there is no man in this film. All women fight for the same man. Those who have one, want to keep him no matter what. And those who do not have one yet only have one goal: To take away somebody else’s husband.
Genres: Drama TV Movie
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1977-06-21
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Adolf and Marlene
Overview: When Hitler watches Marlene Dietrich in a movie, he falls in love with her. He persuades her to come back to Germany to be with him, but upon her arrival she constantly insults and provokes him until he eventually, on her command, bites the carpet to bits.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1977-03-15
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Shattered Glass
Overview: To find a bone marrow donor for himself, fashion designer Jesko visits his upper-class family in southwest Germany where he has to confront mental illness and long-held grudges.
Genres: Drama History
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2002-10-31
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Liebeskonzil
Overview: Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality. - Harvard Film Archive
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1982-03-12
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Fassbinder: Love Without Demands
Overview: Rainer Werner Fassbinder was probably Germany’s most significant post-war director. His swift and dramatic demise at the early age of 37 in 1982 left behind a vacuum in European filmmaking that has yet to be filled, as well as a body of unique, multi-layered and multifarious work of astonishing consistency and rigour. From 1969 onwards, Danish director and film historian Christian Braad Thomsen maintained a close yet respectfully distanced friendship with Fassbinder. Fassbinder – Lieben ohne zu fordern is based on his personal memories as well as a series of conversations and interviews he held with Fassbinder and his mother Lilo in the 1970s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2015-02-07
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Fassbinder
Overview: A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2015-04-30
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Nora Helmer
Overview: A childish wife reveals surprising strength when faced with blackmail. Based on A Doll's House by Ibsen, this is a video recording made for German television.
Genres: Drama TV Movie
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1974-02-03
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Gesche's Poison
Overview: Gesche's Poison is a psychological portrait loosely based on the true story of Gesche Gottfried who became notorious in 19th century Bremen for killing fifteen people with arsenic. Known by her neighbors and friends as a merciful Christian, loving mother and devoted wife, she poisoned within fifteen years her parents, her brother, two husbands, three children and numerous friends. When caught, she never denied her deeds, but could not give any reason.
Genres: Thriller
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1998-01-01
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Sonnenallee
Overview: A group of kids grow up on the short, wrong (east) side of the Sonnenallee in Berlin, right next to one of the few border crossings between East and West reserved for German citizens. The antics of these kids, their families, of the "West German" friends and relatives who come to visit, and of the East German border guards, all serve to illustrate the absurdity of everyday life on the Sonnenallee, and therefore throughout the former East Germany.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1999-10-07
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John Gabriel Borkman
Overview:
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2000-05-27
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Rider of the Flames
Overview: Feuerreiter is an elegant period drama that begins in Frankfurt in 1796. Through his friend, Baron von Sinclair, romantic and rebellious poet Friedrich Hölderlin secures the position of a private tutor in the home of a banker named Gontard. He is soon torn between his passion for poetry and his love for Susette, the lady of the house. To top it all off, Baron von Sinclair is in love with him. Hölderlin's most beautiful poems are written during this trying time. However, he becomes a total recluse when he loses Susette. The film examines the effects of conflicting demands, both emotional and sensual, that may inspire art. Feuerreiter was screened as part of the New German Films at the 49th International Berlin Film Festival, 1999.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1998-05-26
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Der Narr und seine Frau heute Abend in Pancomedia
Overview:
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2002-04-11
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Spiel der Verlierer
Overview:
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1978-10-12
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Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir
Overview: The movie version of Christoph Schlingensief's stageplay.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2009-05-02
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Schlingensief – A Voice That Shook the Silence
Overview: Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2020-08-20
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Mea Culpa - A ReadyMadeOpera
Overview: In Mea Culpa, Christoph Schlingensief blurs a delicate line: he ignores the threshold that separates the healthy from the sick. By making his cancer the subject of an opera, premiering on the largest German-speaking theater, he is putting the art district under pressure: a wonderful institution like the Burgtheater must use its artistic resources lavishly to reveal the entire "truth" about us humans. At the end of the day, when the scenery on Janina Audick's revolving stage has finally come to rest, when Isolde's last Liebestad has been sung enchantingly beautifully by Elfriede Rezabek and indescribable jubilation breaks out, then Schlingensief is completely alone with his illness.
Genres: Music
Original Language: de
Release Date: 2009-10-11
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