Eva Mattes turns 60
On 14 December, the actress Eva Mattes will celebrate her sixtieth birthday. Mattes was still a teenager when she began her film and theater career, giving particularly memorable performances as a dubbing actor for the children’s TV series LASSIE and the German-language version of PIPPI LONGSTOCKING. She later became one of the most well-known faces of New German Cinema, working with directors such as Michael Verhoeven, Roland Klick, Helma Sanders-Brahms and Werner Herzog as well as collaborating with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on several projects. She gave an impressive performance as the protagonist in the film JAIL BAIT (Wildwechsel), which is based on the play of the same name by Franz Xaver Kroetz. As the underage Hanni, she seeks refuge from her repressive parents in the arms of an older man, thereby giving rise to a catastrophe. It is a role in which Mattes lends a disturbing cold-bloodedness to the figure of the naïve, rather ingenuous girl that she often played in this period. Other Fassbinder films in which she appears include EIGHT HOURS ARE NOT A DAY, EFFI BRIEST and IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS. She is known to a wide audience today above all for her performance as the police superintendent Klara Blum in the German police procedural TV series TATORT. The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation warmly congratulates Eva Mattes on her birthday.
More information
Eva Mattes’ website
Information on Fassbinder’s JAIL BAIT
Information on Fassbinder’s EIGHT HOURS ARE NOT A DAY
Information on Fassbinder’s EFFI BRIEST
Information on Fassbinder’s IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS
Photo left: © Peter Gauhe, München und Deutsches Filmmuseum / Frankfurt a. Main
Photo right: © WDR / RWFF