Maria Schrader

Maria Schrader is a German actress, screenwriter, and director born on 27 September 1965 in Hanover, Lower Saxony, then part of West Germany. She first emerged on the German film scene in the early 1990s after studying at the prestigious Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, where she honed both her acting technique and her sense of narrative structure. Her breakthrough performance came with the critically acclaimed Aimée & Jaguar (1999), a film that earned her a Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 49th Berlin International Film Festival, an honor she shared with Juliane Köhler. Beyond acting, Schrader has cultivated a reputation as a versatile creator, writing, producing, and starring in the award‑winning 2007 drama Liebesleben (Love Life), which demonstrated her ability to blend personal storytelling with broader social themes. In addition to her on‑screen work, Schrader has directed a range of projects that have garnered international attention. She co‑directed I Was on Mars (1999) with Dani Levy, her longtime partner, and later helmed the 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, a bold depiction of a young woman leaving an ultra‑orthodox community, for which Schrader received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series. Her filmography also includes the 2022 biographical drama She Said, starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, underscoring her continued relevance in contemporary cinema. Schrader’s career has been marked by a commitment to exploring complex identities, particularly those of Jewish characters, even though she herself is not Jewish. She served on the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival in 2000 and is slated to return in 2025, reflecting her standing in the European film community. With a career spanning over three decades, Schrader remains a pivotal figure whose work bridges acting, writing, and directing across both German and international platforms.