Nastassja Kinski, the revenge of a cinema icon

Her blonde bob and her fuchsia angora dress have forever made her a cinema legend. Nastassja Kinski has become a true icon by playing with rare intensity and almost unreal sweetness the hypnotic Jane of Paris, Texasmasterpiece by Wim Wenders who won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984.

The German actress with azure blue eyes is only 23 years old but already has an entire career behind her with several films to her credit including Tess de Roman Polanski ou encore La Féline by Paul Schrader. She took her first steps in front of the camera under the direction of Wim Wenders ten years earlier, in 1975, in False Movement. The feature film is in the news again today because of a scene where Nastassja, then a teenager, appears lying on a bed, topless, wearing only a child’s pink panties.

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The actor Rüdiger Vogler, aged around thirty, lies on top of her, slaps her then caresses her face. He is also in his underwear. At the time, this deeply problematic scene shocked no one. But young Nastassja feels that all this is by no means “normal”, she recently recalled in an interview with the German dailySüddeutsche Zeitung . The German fought for almost ten years – since 2017 – so that this passage of only a few minutes, “traumatic” and “inappropriate”, was deleted from the film. Silent for years, she had a breakthrough thanks to the #MeToo movement, which first freed the voices of actresses and then, more broadly, that of many women around the world. But she encountered multiple refusals from Wim Wenders.

Faced with the scale of the controversy reignited by Nastassja Kinski’s comments, the director finally gave in, this Thursday, June 4, 2026. «I see today that it should have been better protected,” he conceded in a press release announcing the end of the broadcast of the film. This victory resonates particularly strongly in the trajectory of Nastassja Kinski, confronted from a young age with misogyny and male violence. Part of its history alone represents all the excesses of an era.

“My father was a tyrant”

Could she escape this fate, the daughter of Klaus Kinski, a German actor who went down in history for his genius but also for his extreme violence and abusive behavior? “He was a tyrant. I can barely remember that we sat together at the same table,” she confided in 2013 in an interview with the German Sunday newspaper.Picture on Sundaya few weeks after the shattering revelations of her older sister, Pola, who accuses Klaus Kinski of having raped and sexually assaulted her from the age of 5 to the age of 19.

Nastassja assures that her father “always tried” to abuse her also when she was a child, in the 1960s, when they lived in Rome. “He always touched me too much, he pulled me so against him that I thought I wasn’t going to be able to free myself,” she remembers. “When he died (November 23, 1991, Editor’s note), some people told me they were sorry. I wasn’t,” adds the actress, traumatized by her chaotic childhood, marked by the violence of her father, and the helplessness of her mother, Ruth Brigitte Tocki. “As long as she lived with my father, she was not allowed to work, she was not allowed to leave the apartment. And me neither, for that matter. We were locked up,” she said in 2009 in an interview with the magazine Elle . Ten years earlier, she explained to a journalistGuardian that his mother was in fact “locked in a golden cage”. She was maintained, showered with gifts, jewels and diamonds by Klaus Kinski, but had no right to exist by and for herself.

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At the beginning of the 1970s, the filmmaker met another woman and suddenly left the family home. A relief for little Nastassja who finds herself alone with her mother, first in Rome, then in Munich. However, their lives are no longer so easy. Ruth Brigitte Tocki struggles to make ends meet because she doesn’t work. At the age of 8, Nastassja begins to feel responsible for her happiness because she is “all that is left to him.” The roles are reversed. “As a little girl, I was my mother’s little mother,” she remembers in the columns of Elle. To meet their needs, she multiplies the shenanigans and petty thefts. She ends up getting arrested and spends a few days in a juvenile prison. When she leaves, the rebellious teenager, queen of resourcefulness, is no longer the same. She wants to take charge of herself, to offer herself the opportunity for a better future.

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The Roman Polanski chapter

In 1974, luck smiled on him when Wim Wenders’ wife, Donata – from whom the director has since separated – spotted her dancing rock, and spoke about her to her husband, who was then looking for a teenager to play the role of Mignon in False Movement. “You will have to ask my mother for permission,” Nastassja replies spontaneously. After filming, the teenager crossed paths with Roman Polanski who offered her the role of Tess, initially written for his wife, Sharon Tate, murdered by members of Charles Manson’s cult on August 9, 1969, in Los Angeles. So that she loses her German accent, he demands that she go and live in England for a few months. “I lived in the English countryside then I went to London where I studied with a coach from the London National Theater, several months before the start of filming,” she recalls.untilin 2012.  He then wanted me to do some tests. He was very serious.”

Two long years of preparation later, Nastassja is finally ready. She bursts onto the screen in the role of Tess, an innocent and vulnerable young English peasant from Dorcet. Her angelic features and diaphanous beauty have earned her comparisons to Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn. Beyond the compliments and rave criticism, this experience changes her profoundly. HAS”Tess was for me the moment of transition from adolescence to adulthood,” she confides. Thanks to the feature film, she also became a respected and recognized figure in the profession, nominated for a César, and crowned best female newcomer at the Golden Globes in 1981.

Behind the scenes, Roman Polanski has a romantic relationship with Nastassja. She is 15, he is 42. “Our story didn’t shock anyone. It was a consensual relationship. We remained friends, we write to each other, she knows Emmanuelle and my children,” the director defended in an interview with Paris Match  in 2019. As a reminder, two years before the filming of Tessin 1977, Polanski pleaded guilty to embezzlement of a minor after being accused of raping 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. Released on bail after 42 days in prison, he then fled the United States into exile in France. Despite the affair, Nastassja Kinski never publicly denounced the filmmaker’s actions, and continued to praise him in interviews.

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L’année de la sortie de Paris Texas — which will remain her greatest success — in 1984, the German actress gave birth to her first child, a little boy named Aljosha, the fruit of her love affair with actor Vincent Spano. Two years later, she welcomed a daughter, Sonja, with another man, her husband Ibrahim Moussa, from whom she divorced in 1992. The following year, her other daughter, Kenya, was born from her union with producer Quincy Jones. She naturally slowed down the pace of filming to raise her offspring, but remained present in the cinema, especially in independent films distributed in Europe.

Thrust into the spotlight at a very young age, Nastassja Kinski then fled them, following her artistic instinct rather than glory and recognition. A child traumatized by her father’s violence, a teenager hypersexualized by men, she fought to gain her independence by showing her talent. At 65 years old, his victory against Wim Wenders sounds like revenge, that of a cinema icon, once mistreated, who has finally freed herself from the influence of men.