She was the embodiment of the freedom that suffragettes fought for. Asta Nielsen battled against convention, scandal and powerful men to become the original international film star – a siren of the silent movie.
Her extraordinary life is being rediscovered through one of her movies, The Suffragette – the only surviving example of a film that supported the women who campaigned for the right to vote.
In the centenary of the 1918 Suffrage Act, this 1913 movie has been screened several times already, with the latest planned on Sunday evening at the Arthouse cinema in north London, the opening film in the Still Marching season charting 100 years of women’s protest on film. More screenings of some of Nielsen’s 71 other movies are also planned, according to Torben Skjødt Jensen, a film director who has made two movies about the Danish actress: a documentary and a dramatisation of her life.
“There is a wave of interest in her again,” Jensen said. “She’s recognised as the first real screen actress, the first one who was aware that she was performing on film and not just on stage in theatre. She’s the first who developed a language as an actress and went deeper in the art of performing when she was on film.”
In The Suffragette, Nielsen plays Nelly Panburne – a character modelled on the Pankhursts – who is encouraged by her mother to take a series of militant actions in the campaign for women’s votes, which builds up to a bomb plot against the home of an anti-suffrage politician named Lord William Ascue.
“As far as I know, it’s the only surviving full-length film that has such a predominantly pro-suffrage message in it and tells the story of the British campaign,” Dr Naomi Paxton, a historian of suffrage film and theatre, who is introducing film at the Arthouse, said. “Other storytelling films around suffrage have not yet been found, to put it optimistically. Pretty much everything we have surviving is anti-suffrage. What we have for pro-suffrage is very little, just Pathe newsreel footage.”
It may be that Nielsen’s stardom helped the film survive while others with less well-known actresses were treated with less care. There is one particularly noteworth scene, involving force-feeding – something that British censors deemed too grotesque for theatre audiences to see, Paxton said.
Picking controversial subject matter was a hallmark of Nielsen’s work. In her version of Hamlet, she plays a woman who dresses as a man to seize power by subterfuge, with the famous Shakespearean soliloquy translated into a wordless monologue for the silent film.
According to Jensen: “From the women’s liberation point of view she was one of the first who stood up on women’s rights and wanted to do things her own way. She refused to fit into the male-dominated world. She wanted to have the last word on her own films. She did many of her scripts herself, and that was quite remarkable. This stubbornness and this power that she had was something I really wanted to explore with the films I made about her.”
Nielsen was born in Copenhagen in 1881 and grew up in Malmö in Sweden before returning to Denmark, where she tried to establish a career in theatre. Her attempts were hampered by the birth of her illegitimate daughter, Jesta. “There was a lot of scandal around her,” Jensen said. “She wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was.”
Her breakthrough moment came in 1910 with the release of Afrgrunden (The Abyss), a love triangle with Nielsen choosing between a vicar’s son and a circus cowboy. A scene depicting Nielsen in a tight dress pressing herself against the cowboy as she circles around him caused uproar, with the film’s success and notoriety taking her to Germany. “That was where all the innovative film directors were working,” said Jensen. People like Fritz Lang, GW Pabst and FW Murnau made movies that even modern audiences recognise, including Metropolis and Pandora’s Box.
After two marriages and the first world war, Nielsen entered a golden age in her career and was so famous she was known as “die Asta”, making a prodigious number of films, then adapting them as mimes for the stage in theatres across Europe.
“People know from stories like Cabaret that Berlin was really the roaring twenties,” Jensen said. “She was not performing like Sally Bowles as a singer, but she was in the theatre and everything was every expressive, very extravagant.” Her apartment in the heart of Berlin’s theatreland was awhirl with parties and visitors from all walks of artistic life. The invention of sound in films signalled the end of her career, although in the 1930s there were attempts to get her to give up retirement. “She got invited to a big dinner and was placed next to Hitler,” Jensen said. “He said how he loved her films and how she could mesmerise audiences.” Her reaction was to snub him, the director said, and she returned to Denmark in 1936.
“But she had a reputation in Denmark of being a Nazi sympathiser, so she was excluded from Danish art society,” added Jensen. She got to be a very lonely character. “She felt very bitter, that she had paid a big price, but she had to stand up against people and those men who were famous film directors.”
