Star Profile Carice van Houten Carice van Houten is the current doyenne of Dutch film acting talent. Respected in The Netherlands for her body of theatrical, film and television work, and internationally for her high-profile incursions into Hollywood, her work is charac terised by both a vagabond curiosity and an intense professionalism. After collecting Netherlands Film Festival Golden Calves for her roles in Martin Koolhoven’s Suzy Q (1999) and Vincent Bal’s Minoes (2001),
Van Houten reached international audiences in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006), a role which garnered for her a third Golden Calf. Her mesmeric performance in Black Book led to star roles in Valkyrie (2008), opposite Tom Cruise, and Repo Men (2010), alongside Jude Law and Forest Whitaker. Between these, she gave a powerful performance in Reinout Oerlemans’ A Woman Goes to the Doctor (US title: Stricken 2009) in which she played a woman diagnosed with
breast cancer. She received a Best Actress Rembrandt Award for her performance. In 2010 she acted in two further Dutch films, the comedy The Happy Housewife by Antoinette Beumer, in which van Houten played a socialite wife who is forced to swap canapés for nappies, and Paula van der Oest’s English-language film Black Butterflies, in which she plays the poet Ingrid Jonker (see pages 26-27). Van Houten won her fourth Golden Calf for The Happy Housewife and the best actress award at Tribeca 2011 for Black Butterflies.
Last summer she also played opposite Clive Owen in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s horror/thriller Intruders. The film will be released internationally in October 2011. Van Houten continually underlines her approach to her craft, based on using her own personality to define a role. “I don’t have the feeling I am transforming, really,” she points out. “I don’t believe you can get into somebody’s character but more that somebody comes into you. You just use yourself. In everything I play, I feel like it is me. I just say different things at different times and look different.” Photo: Frans Jansen