Barbara Sukowa

Barbara Sukowa (born 2 February 1950 in Bremen, West Germany) is a celebrated German actress and singer whose career spans more than five decades across cinema, television, and the theatrical stage. She first attracted critical attention after her stage debut in Berlin in 1971 and her invitation to the Darmstädter Nationaltheater, where she worked with directors such as Peter Handke and Luc Bondy. Sukowa’s breakthrough on screen came with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), in which she portrayed the unforgettable Mieze, earning the German Best Young Actress Award and establishing her as a key figure of the New German Cinema. The following year she starred in Fassbinder’s film Lola, winning her first German Film Award for Best Actress; the same period also saw her collaboration with Margarethe von Trotta in Marianne and Juliane, a role that brought her a second German Film Award and the Venice Film Festival Golden Phoenix for Best Actress. Throughout the 1980s she continued to collect honors, most notably the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize for her powerful performance as Rosa Luxemburg in von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg (1986). In the 1990s Sukowa expanded her international profile with roles in Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991), Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager (1991), and David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993), receiving multiple European Film Award nominations. She also appeared in the cyber‑punk thriller Johnny Mnemonic (1995), directed by her future husband Robert Longo, and later took on complex historical figures such as Hildegard of Bingen in Vision (2009) and the philosopher Hannah Arendt in the eponymous 2012 biopic. More recent work includes a recurring role as Katarina Jones in the American series 12 Monkeys (2015‑2018), a supporting turn in Atomic Blonde (2017), and a critically lauded performance in the French drama Two of Us (2019), which earned her a Lumière Award and a César nomination. In addition to acting, Sukowa has cultivated a parallel career as a classical music narrator, performing the speaker’s part in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Gurrelieder with leading orchestras, and she fronts the avant‑garde band the X‑Patys, which she co‑founded with visual artists Jon Kessler and Robert Longo. Her personal life mirrors her artistic versatility: married first to actor Hans‑Michael Rehberg, later to Longo, she is mother to three sons and continues to split her time between Europe and the United States, remaining an influential presence in both film and concert halls.