Modern Language Review

Asta Nielsen is hardly a household name in Anglophone cultures, unlike other stars of silent cinema such as Clara Bow or Greta Garbo. Yet as the Foreword to this book puts it, she was ‘Europe’s first international film star in the early twentieth century’ and ‘arguably the greatest film actress of the era’ (p. xiii). Garbo herself once declared that Nielsen ‘taught me everything I know’ (ibid.). What excluded her from the familiar canon of film stardom was the fact that she chose not to go to [End Page 416] Hollywood: Danish by birth, Nielsen made almost all of her seventy-two multi-reel narrative feature films in Germany, during the ‘golden age’ of German cinema, achieving colossal fame throughout Europe, including in the United Kingdom, but rarely seen on screen in the USA. Her memoirs, first published in Danish in the late 1940s but here translated and with a helpful introduction, cast a fascinating light on the early history of film as well as introducing Anglophone readers to the life and career of a woman who helped to shape it.

The memoirs paint a selective, self-censored, but nonetheless compelling picture of Nielsen’s rags-to-riches ascent to stardom, with Julie Allen’s notes indicating where important elements of the star’s private life have been omitted or discreetly veiled. She emerges from the text as a strong-willed, creative woman in full control of her career choices and public image; the accompanying photographs show a dark, wide-eyed, and strikingly beautiful woman and suggest a powerful physical presence. Above all her account illuminates the hard work, conflicts, and sheer inventiveness that went into the creation of a new medium. Born into a loving but financially unstable family, Nielsen spent her childhood, often in severe poverty, between Copenhagen and Sweden, depending on where her father found work. A vibrantly energetic, curious child who loved to write and perform plays with her sister and cousins, she discovered and immediately fell in love with the stage when singing in a children’s choir. When her father died shortly before Nielsen’s fourteenth birthday, her mother had her destined for shop work to help the failing family fortunes, but Asta battled to pursue her dreams and through sheer bravado persuaded a prominent Danish actor to give her free tuition in the art of acting, before gaining auditions and joining a theatre company.

By her own account, Nielsen’s early acting career was a harsh apprenticeship of low pay, endless minor roles, and much international touring in the most frugal of conditions. The notes also alert us to what the text excludes: the illegitimate birth of a child in 1901 and the nineteen-year-old Nielsen’s refusal—surely courageous at the time—to marry the father. Jesta, Nielsen’s daughter, was largely brought up by Nielsen’s mother and sister as she did her best to combine personal ambition and financial support for the family by advancing her career. A working visit to Paris allowed her to see Sarah Bernhardt in the iconic role of Phèdre, and—since Nielsen had no French—to appreciate the crucial power of gesture and facial movement in her performance. When in 1907 Nordisk Film invited the still little-known actress to take the leading role in a planned film, she was disinclined to risk her professional standing in a new medium ‘still considered to be little more than entertainment for street urchins’ (p. 119). But when Urban Gad (her first husband, though their relationship is erased from the narrative) wrote a screenplay The Abyss specifically for her in 1910, a group of young artists and technicians managed to raise the necessary investment for eight days of filming, and with only natural lighting, experimenting with new techniques for a new medium—in Nielsen’s case a physically expressive, intimate style of acting—they created a...