Asta Nielsen

Born in Denmark in 1881, Nielsen made seventy of her seventy-four films in Germany, where audiences knew her simply as Die Asta. Her large dark eyes, mask-like face, and boyish frame became the template for passionate women caught in tragic circumstances, and the erotic charge of her work got her censored in the United States. She's credited with pulling movie acting away from overt theatricality toward naturalism - the shift that made screen performance its own language. In the 1920s she founded her own studio in Berlin, then left for Denmark in 1937 when the Nazis rose. She spent her final decades out of view, making collages and writing, and died in 1972.