Kinski was born in West Berlin as Nastassja Aglaia Nakszynski.[3] She is the daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski[4] and his second wife, actress Ruth Brigitte Tocki.[5] She is of partial Polish descent, for her grandfather Bruno Nakszynski was a Germanized ethnic Pole.[6] Kinski has two half-siblings: Pola and Nikolai Kinski. Her parents divorced in 1968. After the age of 10, Kinski rarely saw her father. Her young mother struggled financially to support them;[7] they eventually lived in a commune in Munich.
In a 1999 interview, Kinski denied that her father had molested her as a child, but said he had abused her "in other ways".[7] In 2013, when interviewed about the allegations of sexual abuse made by her half-sister Pola Kinski,[8][9] she confirmed that he attempted this with her, but did not succeed. She said, "He was no father. Ninety-nine percent of the time I was terrified of him. He was so unpredictable that the family lived in constant terror." When asked what she would say to him now, if she had the chance, she replied, "I would do anything to put him behind bars for life. I am glad he is no longer alive."[10]
Career
Kinski began working as a model as a teenager in Germany. Actress Lisa Kreuzer of the German New Wave helped get her the role of the mute Mignon in Wim Wenders 1975 film The Wrong Move,[11] in which at the age of 12 she was depicted topless.[11][12] She later played one of the leading roles in Wenders' film Paris, Texas (1984) and appeared in his film Faraway, So Close (1993).
In 1976, while still a teenager, Kinski had her first two major roles: in Wolfgang Petersen's feature film-length episode Reifezeugnis of the German TV crime series Tatort. Next, she appeared in the British horror film To the Devil a Daughter (1976), produced by Hammer Film Productions, which was released in the UK just 40 days after Kinski's fifteenth birthday, making it a virtual certainty she was only fourteen when her scenes were shot (including full frontal nudity). In regards to her early films, Kinski has stated that she felt exploited by the industry. In an interview with W, she said, "If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart."[13]
In 1978, Kinski starred in the Italian romance Stay as You Are (Così come sei) with Marcello Mastroianni, gaining her recognition in the United States after New Line Cinema released it there in December 1979. Time wrote that she was "simply ravishing, genuinely sexy and high-spirited without being painfully aggressive about it."[14] The film also received a major international release from Columbia Pictures.
Kinski met the director Roman Polanski at a party in 1976.[15] He urged her to study method acting with Lee Strasberg in the United States and she was offered the title role in Polanski's upcoming film, Tess (1979). In 1978, Kinski underwent extensive preparation for the portrayal of an English peasant girl, which included acquiring a Dorset accent through elocution studies:
I was given the book almost a year prior to read, I then had to transform myself and lose my German accent completely. I worked with a coach from the National Theatre in London, Kate Fleming. It was almost an intellectual voyage. [...] I went to live in the countryside of the deep part of England, on a farm, did everything they did, and learned it. When the time came in Paris to do my test, it was with our director and our producers Claude Berri and Timothy Burrill, I had done a screen test with Roman prior to that, for Dino DeLaurentis, but now this was for Tess. Preparation is an amazing thing. It, somehow, after all the work, carries you if you are fully present, it carries you through like a bird, like big inner and outer wings.[16]
The film was nominated for six awards, including Best Picture, at the 53rd Academy Awards, and won three.
In 1981, Richard Avedon photographed Kinski with a Burmese python coiled around her nude body.[5] The image, which first appeared in the October 1981 issue of US Vogue, was released as a poster and became a best-seller, further confirming her status as a sex symbol.[17]
In 1982, she starred in Francis Ford Coppola's romantic musical One from the Heart, her first film made in the United States.[18]Texas Monthly described her as acting "as a Felliniesque circus performer to represent the twinkling evanescence of Eros."[19] The film failed at the box office and was a major loss for Coppola's new Zoetrope Studios. That year, she was also in the erotic supernatural horror movie Cat People. On 29 December 1982, Kinski made a puzzling appearance on the program Late Night with David Letterman, seeming somewhat oblivious to the jokes and everything else that was going on around her and appearing with an unusual hair style Letterman described as "looking like there was an owl perched on top of her head." (Letterman's second guest, John Candy, came out with his own hair moussed up in a pile as a spoof of Kinski's hair.)
In 1976, when Kinski was aged 15, it was speculated that there had been a romantic relationship with director Roman Polanski, who at the time was 43.[22][23][24][25] Polanski confirmed the relationship in a 1994 interview with Diane Sawyer: "...what about Nastassja Kinski? She was young and we had a love affair."[26] However, in a 1999 interview in The Guardian, Kinski was quoted as saying that there was no affair and that, "There was a flirtation. There could have been a seduction, but there was not. He had respect for me."[7]
Kinski has three children from different relationships. Her first child, son Aljosha Nakszynski (born 29 June 1984), was fathered by actor Vincent Spano, her co-star in Maria's Lovers.[27] On 10 September 1984, Kinski married Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Moussa, with whom she had daughter Sonja Kinski (born 2 March 1986). The marriage was dissolved in July 1992. From 1992 until 1995, Kinski lived with musician Quincy Jones, though she kept her own apartment on Hilgard Avenue, near UCLA, at the time.[28] They had a daughter, Kenya Julia Niambi Sarah Jones (born 9 February 1993),[29] a model known professionally as Kenya Kinski-Jones.[30]
Among others, her achievements in film industry include also two César Awards nominations, one Globo d'oro nomination, and one Saturn Award nomination.
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