Career
After finishing high school in Germany, Potente enrolled at the Otto Falckenberg School of Performing Arts in Munich. Potente took acting jobs outside school time and appeared in her first movie in the 1995 student film Aufbruch. She was then spotted by a casting agent and appeared in the film Nach Fünf im Urwald (It's a Jungle Out There), directed by her then-boyfriend, Hans Christian Schmid. She received the 1996 Bavarian Film Prize for Young Talent for her work in this film. She then finished her last year of training at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Manhattan.
Potente returned to Europe and worked in German and French films. She was cast as the lead in Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) after meeting the director, Tom Tykwer, in a café. The part was written for her. The film was a small-budget art house film production and was popular in Europe. Potente also performed on the film's soundtrack. She made several more German-language films, including the horror film Anatomy and the romantic thriller The Princess and the Warrior, also directed by Tykwer.
Potente's first English-language role was that of film editor in Storytelling in 2001. This was followed by a role in Blow, with Johnny Depp, and the female lead in The Bourne Identity, with Matt Damon, which she reprised in The Bourne Supremacy. In 2006, she starred with Eric Bana in the Australian film Romulus, My Father, for which she was nominated for an Australian Film Industry Award for Best Lead Actress. Also in 2006, she wrote and directed Der die Tollkirsche ausgräbt, a silent comedy.
Starting on May 22, 2007, Potente had a three-episode recurring role in the FX drama The Shield, where she played Diro Kesakhian, "the ruthless godmother of L.A.'s Armenian mafia".
In 2009, she appeared in the House television series two-part episode "Broken". In January 2011, she played Hilda in a BBC drama The Sinking of the Laconia. She will star as the brothel madam Eva Heissen in BBC America's first original scripted series, Copper.
Read more about this topic: Franka Potente
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