This strikingly attractive lead, with pouty lips and a slightly haughty manner, is best known for her performance in the title role in Roman Polanski’s sumptuous “Tess” (1979) as well as for her screen collaborations with Wim Wenders: a silent role in “Falsche Bewegung/Wrong Move” (1975); the estranged wife of Harry Dean Stanton (her most affecting performance to date) in “Paris, Texas” (1984); and an angelic presence in “Faraway, So Close” (1993).
The daughter of actor Klaus Kinski (with whom she had little contact after the age of 10) and sister of actress Pola Kinski, Nastassja (billed as Nastassia in the USA in the early 80s) was a teenager when she met and fell in love with director Roman Polanski, 25 years her senior. Under his spell, she went to the USA for six months to study “The Method” with Lee Strasberg. Then, Polanski put Kinski in her star-making role, of “Tess”. In the film based on the Thomas Hardy novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, Kinski played a girl from a poor background whose fortunes rise and fall after she is thrust into “polite” society. The film established her and she furthered raised her profile by posing for photographer Richard Avedon, who shot a nude poster of the actress and a snake that became the rage of college dorm rooms.
Kinski moved into American films, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s uneven “One From the Heart” and opposite Malcolm McDowell in “Cat People” (both 1982), both of which made her raw, reactive sensuality briefly the rage. But Kinski’s free-spirited, sex-charged yet aloof screen persona did not click with US audiences. She seemed content to retain a low-key presence and appeared in films on both sides of the Atlantic. The same year she played pianist Clara Wieck in “Frulingssinfonie/Spring Symphony” (1983), Kinski starred in “The Moon in the Gutter” for French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, with whom she was linked romantically. But her performance–as a wealthy woman involved with Gerard Depardieu–was almost universally panned. She fared better with the critics as the wife in Wenders’ “Paris, Texas”, but that film was limited to an art-house crowd.
In 1984, she starred in two Hollywood productions, neither of which won widespread audience attention. Kinski was cast as the wife whom Dudley Moore thought was philandering in the unsatisfying remake “Unfaithfully Yours” and was alongside Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe in Tony Richardson’s “The Hotel New Hampshire”. She was miscast as the love interest to Al Pacino caught up into the colonial dispute with Britain in Hugh Hudson’s box-office dud “Revolution” (1985). Most of her subsequent films in the 80s and into the early 90s were little seen in the USA including the American ones.
But Kinski’s profile in American gossip columns and tabloids skyrocketed in the 90s when she gave birth and named Quincy Jones as the father of her daughter, Kenya Julia. Their relationship became fodder for tabloid reports and made Kinski more well-known than all her films combined. Her acting services were in greater demand and she scored a critical success as the skydiving student of Charlie Sheen’s who appears to have died on her first jump–but has not–in “Terminal Velocity” (1994). Her work in US films then became more mainstream. She was the mother of a runaway teen who may be the son of either Robin Williams or Billy Crystal in the genial comedy “Father’s Day” (1997). That same year, the busy actress co-starred with Ryan Phillippe and John Savage in “Little Boy Blue”, a study of incest and dysfunction in a Texas family, and was opposite Wesley Snipes in Mike Figgis’ study of marriage and infidelity, “One Night Stand”.
In the mid-90s, Kinski also began to appear with some regularity on American TV. She was involved in a diamond heist in “Crackerjack” (HBO, 1994) and played a German war widow who flees to the USA to start life anew in “Danielle Steel’s ‘The Ring’” (NBC, 1996).
- Also Credited As:
Nastasha Kinski, Nastassia Kinski, Nastassja Aglaia Nakszynski, Nastassja Nakszynski, Natasha Kinski, Natassja Kinski
- Born:
on 01/24/1960 in Berlin, Germany
- Job Titles:
Actor
Family
- Daughter: Kenya Julia Miambi Sarah Jones. born on February 9, 1993; father, Quincy Jones
- Daughter: Sonia Moussa. born in 1986; father, Ibrahim Moussa
- Father: Klaus Kinski. born 1926, died November 23, 1991; Nastassja was estranged from him partly due to parents’ divorce
- Half-brother: Nikolai Kinski. born on July 31, 1976
- Mother: Ruth Brigitte Tocki. divorced from Kinski’s father c. 1965
- Sister: Pola Kinski.
- Son: Aljosha Moussa. born in June 1984, prior to marriage of Kinski to his father Ibrahim Moussa
Significant Others
- Husband: M Ibrahim Moussa. married in September 1984; have two children together; divorced in 1992
- Companion: Jean-Jacques Beineix. began relationship when he was directing her in “Moon in the Gutter” (1983)
- Companion: Jonathan Krane.
- Companion: Paul Schrader. had relationship during filming of “Cat People”
- Companion: Quincy Jones. together c. 1992-94; have one child
- Companion: Roman Polanski. began relationship when she was 15; starred in his film “Tess” (1979)
Milestones
- 1975 Feature film debut, a slient part in Wim Wenders’ “Falsche Bewegung/False Moves/Wrong Move”
- 1976 Appeared in Wolfgang Petersen’s “Reifezeungnis”, a film made for German TV
- 1979 Breakthrough role as title character in “Tess”, directed by Roman Polanski
- 1981 Posed for bestselling nude poster by photographer Richard Avedon
- 1982 Made first US films, “One From the Heart” and “Cat People”
- 1984 Turned to comedy with “Unfaithfully Yours”
- 1984 Worked with Wim Wenders again on his English-language “Paris, Texas”
- 1993 Played an angel in Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close”
- 1994 Made US TV-movie debut in “Crackerjacks” (HBO)
- 1996 Starred in “Danielle Steel’s ‘The Ring’” (NBC)
- 1997 Returned to US films with “Little Boy Blue,” “Father’s Day,” and “One Night Stand”
- 1998 Offered fine supporting turn as a lesbian artist’s assistant in Neil LaBute’s “Your Friends and Neighbors”
