Nina Hoss

Nina Hoss (birthname: Nina Hoss) is a major, acclaimed German actor who has a regular collaborator with major German filmmaker Christian Petzold and is one of the few German-born actors with a significant international profile. After seven years of credits in minor German features and TV movies, Hoss was cast in her first of several films, Wolfsburg (2003), with renowned German writer-director Petzold.

Hoss’ first major starring role was in Hermine Huntgeburth’s The White Masai (2005), with Jacky Ido, followed by a supporting role in director Oskar Roehler’s film adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (2006), with Moritz Bleibtrau, Martina Gedeck, and Franka Potente.

Nina Hoss’ first major triumph was as the lead in Christian Petzold’s brilliant drama, Yella (2007), for which she won the Best Actress Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Hoss and Petzold teamed up again for a striking version of The Postman Always Rings Twice in Jerichow (2008), co-starring Benno Furmann and premiering at the Toronto Film Festival.

Starring with Eugeny Sidikhin, Hoss led the cast of writer-director Max Färberböck’s A Woman in Berlin (2008), premiering at the Berlin Film Festival. Hoss jumped into the vampire genre with We Are the Night (2010), followed by her next feature with writer-director Petzold, the East German-set Barbara (2012), co-written by Harun Farocki and with Ronald Zehrfeld and Jasna Fritzi Bauer, winning Petzold the Best Director Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

For her work with the brilliant German filmmaker Thomas Arslan, Nina Hoss portrayed a woman on a venture to the Klondike Gold Rush in Gold (2013), a rare German-made Western, co-starring Marko Mandic, Uwe Bohm, Lars Rudolph, and Peter Kurth, and premiering in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Hoss’ first U.S. co-production was director Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man (2014), starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Robin Wright, and Homayoun Ershadi, and premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.

Hoss delivered another superb performance under Petzold’s direction (with co-writer Harun Farocki) in the post-war Berlin drama, Phoenix (2014), with Ronald Zehrfeld and Nina Kunzendorf. Working for the first time with veteran German writer-director Volker Schlöndorff, Hoss co-starred with Stellan Skarsgard and Niels Arestrup in Schlöndorff’s and co-writer (and acclaimed Irish novelist) Colm Tóibín’s adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel, Return to Montauk (2017), selected for the Berlin Film Festival competition.

Portraying a violin teacher, Hoss starred in writer-director Ina Weisse’s The Audition (2019), with Simon Abkarian and Jens Albinius, premiering at the Toronto Film Festival. Hoss starred in the well-received German-Bulgarian co-production, Pelican Blood (2019), which premiered in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival, followed by the theatre-based drama starring Hoss, My Little Sister (2020), by Swiss co-writers-directors Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond and co-starring Lars Eidinger and Marthe Keller.

Nina Hoss was cast in her first Hollywood studio movie in 2022 with Paramount’s action thriller, The Contractor, starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Kiefer Sutherland, and Eddie Marsan. Writer-director-producer Todd Field cast Hoss as the first violinist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in his remarkable drama, Tár (2022), starring Cate Blanchett (who won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival) and Noémie

Merlant. Nina Hoss co-starred with Daisy Ridley and Kristin Scott Thomas in writer-director Jane Anderson’s WWII/post-war drama, Women in the Castle (2023), based on Jessica Shattuck’s novel. Hoss then co-starred with Vanessa Paradis in director Vanessa Filho’s period drama about surrealist artist-stepsisters battling Nazis, Trespassers (2023), which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.