Marthe Keller

Marthe Keller — Biography

Marthe Keller was born on 28 January 1945 in Basel; she trained in ballet as a child, turned to acting after a skiing accident at sixteen, and performed at the Schiller Theater and the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin. She made an early screen appearance in Funeral in Berlin in 1966 and went on to appear in a run of French films through the 1970s. Her turn opposite Dustin Hoffman in John Schlesinger's Marathon Man brought her a Golden Globe nomination, and around the same time she played a terrorist in Black Sunday and starred with Al Pacino in Bobby Deerfield, after which the two were briefly a couple. Following Fedora (1978) with William Holden, she worked mostly in European cinema. On stage, her role in the 2001 Broadway production of Judgment at Nuremberg earned her a Tony nomination, and she also built a parallel career in opera as both a speaking performer and a director, staging Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera in 2004. In 2016 she presided over the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes. She has a son, Alexandre, born in 1972 from her relationship with director Philippe de Broca, holds French honours including knighthood in the Legion of Honour, and continues to act in her eighties.