key dates 1959: 1979: 1982: 1984: 1992: 1994: filmography main site
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Born 1959 Actressgall. | books | dvds | posters | videos
tessBorn on 24 January in Berlin, Germany, daughter of actor Klaus Kinski
Appears in Tess
Appears in Cat People
Appears in Paris, Texas . Marries Ibrahim Moussa. 2 children
Divorces Moussa
Appears in Faraway, So Close!. Child with partner Quincy Jones
height:5' 6½" (1.69 m)
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Tess (1979)
- Born | Nastassja Nakszynski
Yet there was a moment, in the early eighties, when Kinski was the rage, asensation . . . the most beautifial girl in theworld. Her greatest interest may be in pioneering the new brevity of such rages. I suspect I wasn't alone in this but I thought that she was so beautiful that all I wanted was a girlfriend who looked remotely like her. In the end I settled for a Klaus Kinski lookalike but that's another story, In May 1982, she was on the cover of Rolling Stone, in one of several Avedon photographs that showed her naked and tousledin bed. John Simon's text began: The piece went on - as if Simon had been inthat bed with Kinski: But the rage wasn't just John Simon and Rolling Stone. Avedon photographed Kinski with a python - the reptile and the lady in justtheir shining skins. Paul Schrader, in love with Kinski, said she was like the young IngridBergman. Time put her on its cover: the profile writer, Richard Corliss, called her "Nasty."Director James Toback told the press that Norman Mailer had told him she had a qualitylike Monroes. I met Ms. Kinski, and she was lovely, uncertain, tricky, and helplessly seductive: it wasevident that she looked to every new moviedirector as potential lover. Yet she was somehow frozen, too, as if waiting to be memorialized in still photographs, conscious of thehuge effect she was having. She had vagueplans for more training, for theater, and for acareer. But it seemed plain that she was thevictim of the speed with which her life wasmoving, the eroticism of allowing oneself tobe looked at, and the sheer perishability ofsuch intensity. What can one say after the sensation? Thatshe was like thousands of other young women? That she had an extraordinarily alert, waitinggaze, enough to rivet other people and swaythe camera? She was also Klaus Kinski's daughter. Thefamily lived together for some eight yearsbefore divorce. What did that do to the child?There was a time when she did not speak toher father - yet talking to Klaus Kinski wasnever enough. She was silent in Wrong Movement (75,Wim Wenders); To the Devil - A Daughter (76, Peter Sykes); Reifenzeugnis (76, Wolfgang Petersen); Boarding School (78, AndreFarwagi); Stay As You Are (78, Alberto Lattuada); very accomplished and touching as Tess (79, Roman Polanski); the circus girl in One From the Heart (82, Francis Ford Coppola); daringly sensual and often naked as thereleased sexual urge in Cat People (82, Schrader); as Clara Wieck in Spring Symphony (83, Peter Schamoni); The Moon in the Gutter (83, Jean-Jacques Beneix); her bodyplayed by violinist Rudolph Nureyev's bow in Exposed (83, Toback); the old Linda Darnell role in Unfaithfully Yours (84, Howard Zieff),her childishness awoken by Dudley Moore; ather best in Paris, Texas (84, Wenders); TheHotel New Hampshire (84, Tony Richardson); Maria's Lovers (84, Andrei Konchalovsky); Revolution (85, Hugh Hudson); and Harem (85, Arthur Joffe). It was over. She married and had children. Later on, she moved in with musician Quincy Jones and had another child. There have beenmore films, made in Europe, bnt only a feware notable: Intervista (87, Federico Fellini); Torrents of Spring (88, Jerzy Skolimowski); Night Sun (90, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani);and Faraway, So Close (93, Wenders). gallery | books | dvds | posters | videosBy the time 1993 came around, Ms. Kinski was still younger than,say, Anjelica Huston was when Prizzi's Honor opened. And yet even then Kinski had been "gone" - with child, husband, retired, or in minor films that do not open widely for several years. Since then, she has moved in the same ever decreasing circles until today she is but a rumour, a whisper, in the hallowed corridors of the screen gods.
"I ask myselfwhat makes Nastassia [remember that?] Kinski, at twenty-one, the biggest sex symbol of1982, and perhaps of many years to come . . ."
"The breasts are perfect, though some might think them a bit small, pubescent; over the youthfully querying eyes, the brows are adult and ripelyfemale. Or consider the voice: high and trilling one instant, then, suddenly, overcast, sensually clouded, as if a dark velvet hooddescended protectively over some preciouscrystal object. The walk is emphatic: a veryfeminine presence approaching with masculine directness ..."
tess
