In the well-acclaimed Hollywood movie Valkyrie Carice van Houten had a role opposite Tom Cruise. Then the Dutch actress returned to the Netherlands and starred in some of the most successful Dutch film productions ever. The Dutch have few doubts: Carice van Houten is their darling of the silver screen.

Carice van Houten has said she’s not simply out for commercial success; she wants interesting roles. One such role came in her recent film The Happy Housewife (2010) - based on a book by Heleen van Royen – in which she plays a young woman who goes into psychosis after giving birth, and ultimately ends up a psychiatric hospital.

Weird
This tragicomedy is one she is proud of. "It’s a weird combination of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest-type scenes in a hospital where there are crazy people and funny scenes. There are also scenes of severe crises, where I go completely crazy", she said in an interview.

United States
Fine art actress Carice van Houten is not the product of a drama school education; instead, after gaining some acting experience at school, she attended the Academy of Performing Arts in Amsterdam - which offered classes in things like writing, dancing and singing and gave her the opportunity to do a lot of comedy.

Her first professional acting role came in a television-film titled Suzy Q. The first time an audience outside the Netherlands had a chance to see her was in Martin Koolhoven's film AmnesiA (2001), which got a small theatrical release in the United States.

Moving feelings
Carice van Houten’s international breakthrough came in 2006 with the film Black Book (original Dutch title: Zwartboek), in which she starred as a Jewish singer who joins the Dutch resistance movement then falls in love with a member of the occupying Nazi forces - a scenario with a novel and provocative approach to World War II. The film’s director Paul Verhoeven - already well-established in the Netherlands before he came to international prominence with movies such as Basic Instinct - said of the movie: "there are no people who are completely good or completely bad. In this movie, everything has a shade of grey".

The film proved controversial, and divided the critics, but they were full of praise for its female star. US magazine Variety noted how easily Carice van Houten moves between feelings of fear, defiance, caprice and caring; the New York Times raved about the ferocious energy of the actress; a review in the German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung said Carice van Houten is not only more beautiful but also a better actress than Scarlett Johansson.

Nelson Mandela
In 2011, Carice van Houten starred in Black Butterflies as the South African poet Ingrid Jonker, who stood up against apartheid. The interest in Jonker's work has grown in the years since Nelson Mandela recited one of her poems during his first speech in the South African parliament in 1994. In an interview with internet magazine Static Mass, Van Houten explained how she gradually came to understand the poet. "I was quite close to her character, I was fighting with her. There was a point in the beginning where I did not like her and then it turned around and I completely defended her".

Now, after several years’ making movies, Carice van Houten has decided to take a year off - "I need some time for myself," she said, then adds, "But you never know...".

The actress's website is caricevanhouten.nl.

(rr, tf, ks)