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Source: Prokino, DIF
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"Lola rennt" (1998)
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Franka Potente was born July 22, 1974, near Dülmen in Westfalia, as the daughter of a teacher and a medical technical assistant. The family name goes back to a Sicilian great-grandfather. After finishing high school in Dülmen, Potente went to Munich in 1994 to attend actor's training at Otto-Falckenberg-Schule. During her studies, she was discovered by a casting agent and made her debut on the movie screen in 1995 in Hans-Christian Schmid's film "Nach fünf im Urwald" ("It's A Jungle Out There"). Potente won a Bavarian film award for her performance in the role of a young runaway who returns to her parents' home after several bleak experiences in the big city.
She dropped out of drama school in Munich to continue actor's training in New York at Lee Strasberg's school. Potente now regularly received role offers, mainly for TV productions. She played a single mother in "Coming In", a reporter in the two-part TV movie "Opernball" ("Opera Ball"), and a lesbian ski racer in "Rennlauf".
Her second film on the movie screen, Peter F. Bringmann's "Die drei Mädels von der Tankstelle" ("Babes' Petrol") turned into an "extremely unambitious mixture of a slapstick comedy and a girlie trend clip" (film-dienst, Nr. 13, June 24, 1997).
In 1997, Potente made her international breakthrough in Tom Tykwer's "Lola rennt" ("Run Lola Run") as a cheeky redhead who is running through Berlin to scratch up 100.000 Deutsche Mark for her boy friend. The box office hit (2.5 million viewers in Germany) won eight German film awards.
At that point, Potente was considered to be a "girl wonder" that "brought a certain hint of youthfulness and reality into German cinema that had been missing for a long time" (Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 24, 1998). Magazines praised the actress's charisma: "Potente is neither a sex bomb nor a sunshine girl. She has the authentic beauty of next door's girl. Plus, she is self-confident, cool, and not at all bitchy. That's what the people like." (Libro Journal, Nr. 2, 2000)
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In Doris Dörrie's
"Bin ich schön?" ("Am I Beautiful?", 1998), Potente played a young
woman who hitchhikes through Spain and pretends to be deaf-mute. In Friedemann Fromm's
film "Schlaraffenland" ("Paradise Mall"), she came under permanent fire
as the security officer of a shopping centre. In "Anatomie"
("Anatomy"), she sawed up dead bodies as an ambitious medicine student
in anatomical pathology and disclosed a mysterious doctors union. The
box office hit received held back reviews, however, Potente made a
convincing performance as a sort of shy, young woman of good family who
only cares about her studies but then has to prove her instincts and
her perseverance.
Tom Tykwer, her companion at the time, directed "Der
Krieger und die Kaiserin" ("The Princess and the Warrior"). In the
film, Potente played a nurse who starts to search her life saviour. The
international success of Tykwer's films paved the way to Potente's
Hollywood debut in "Blow", the life story of the drug dealer George
Jung (Johnny Depp). In the spy films "The Bourne Identity" (2000/01)
und "The Bourne Supremacy" (2003), Potente starred alongside Matt
Damon.
Since her break-up with Tom Tykwer that was made public in the spring of 2002 Franka Potente lives in Berlin and London.
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