Kirsten Dene

Kirsten Dene ( Nestroy 2017 )

Kirsten Dene (born March 16, 1943 in Hamburg ) is a German actress .

Life

Kirsten Dene completed her acting training in her hometown of Hamburg. Since 1961 she has played almost exclusively in theater. She first made her debut in Essen. In the early 1970s she came to the Stuttgart State Theater via the Schauspiel Frankfurt am Main and Berlin , where Claus Peymann became artistic director. An artistic “marriage” began here, which continues to this day. Kirsten Dene became one of the protagonists of Claus Peymann's directorial theater. For years she played the roles of Fräulein Schneider, Thomas Bernhard and Hermann Beil in Thomas Bernhard's Claus Peymann buys a pair of pants and goes out to eat with me .

In 1979 she followed him to the Schauspielhaus Bochum . One of the legendary performances of this time was Peymann's staging of the Hermannsschlacht by Heinrich von Kleist . This piece actually seemed unplayable, but Dene as Thusnelda and Gert Voss as Hermann gave a guerrilla couple that appealed to the zeitgeist, and the performance is still one of the largest of Peymann's time in Bochum .

In 1986 she went to the Burgtheater in Vienna with the stars of the Bochum Ensemble and Claus Peymann . Thomas Bernhard wrote his play Ritter, Dene, Voss and thus determined the cast of the premiere in the title. She played this piece for many years with partners Ilse Ritter and Gert Voss , in 2004 at the Berliner Ensemble . In 2010 she received the Nestroy Theater Prize for best actress. In the same year she also received the Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring for her life's work and in particular for the performance of Violet Weston in Tracy Letts ' Eine Familie at the Vienna Burgtheater and Gunhild in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann . In 2015 she was awarded the Joana Maria Gorvin Prize and in 2017 she was awarded the Nestroy Prize for her life's work.