Biography

If self-confidence is the essence of the women Martina Gedeck played on stage or in a film, then it is a hesitant, a thoughtful, a very vulnerable self-confidence. You can always feel that these characters are not 'finished', that they are wrestling for themselves and their path, that they want to assert themselves against all obstacles. They come close to the viewer through their naturalness, they inspire trust, they move in everyday life with bravery and defiance, with a passion that is touching and arousing. Martina Gedeck invites you to make discoveries in her game, she depicts people in such a way that everything foreign melts away and you want to learn more and more about their fates. She can do without well-made, smooth beauty - in her expressive face there are human stories of various kinds, sad, cheerful, those full of confidence - and renunciation. They are stories that are deeply memorable and cannot be forgotten. Openness and friendliness, pain and deep immersion, but above all honesty. As little place setting can be set, it remains true to itself. She wants closeness to life, she wants to show with her characters what is given to humans and how they can survive in our world, be it on the screen, on the theater stage or in selected music projects.

Born in Munich, living in Berlin and also educated there at the University of the Arts (Max Reinhardt Seminar), Martina Gedeck is one of the internationally successful, celebrated actresses of our time. Theater and film do her justice equally, even if the focus of her work is on film. She has worked in more than 100 cinema and TV productions so far, always with lasting success. In the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, she achieved one of her most convincing achievements with the sensitive, inwardly torn and yet unswerving actress Christa Maria Sieland. In the film Die Wand she draws the disturbing portrait of a woman cut off from the world and struggling to survive mentally. She last played the title role in Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. In January 2020 she can be seen again on the stage of the Berlin State Opera in Beat Furrer's opera Violetter Schnee as a 'white woman', a being who lingers in the space between life and death.

Concerting with musicians occupies a special place in her artistic work: as an experienced and expressive speaker, combining poetry with music is the essence of her work with well-known ensembles and soloists. This intensive examination of the musical has also had a lasting impact on her attitude towards the spoken word over the years, says Martina Gedeck. Transporting, designing and disclosing content and meaning beyond the pure sense of the word is the particular strength of sound and music.

Over the years, a diverse repertoire of different musical and literary stripes has emerged. Martina Gedeck's current projects include the collaboration with harpist Xavier de Maistre, who brings together works by Debussy, Liszt, Tárregas, Albéniz ’and Reniés with poems by Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Wilde, Eichendorff and Leconte de Lisle. Together with the Schumann Quartet, she presents an evening about the love triangle between Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. A concert reading with Georg Nigl and Elena Bashkirova, in which songs from Schubert to Eisler and texts from Goethe to Brecht are questioned in terms of their meaning, will have its premiere in Brussels in November 2020. After her successful Else Lasker-Schüler project, there will be another collaboration with Avi Avital on the subject of “Faith and Knowledge” in 2021.