Heike Makatsch, the actress Germany still sees as its 1990s VIVA girl

Heike Makatsch

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 13, 1971 Düsseldorf, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Love Actually, The Book Thief, Resident Evil
Awards	Bavarian Film · Goldene Kamera · Bambi · Bavarian TV · Romy

For a lot of Germans, Heike Makatsch still lives inside a music-television studio: blunt fringe, quick mouth, the presenter teenagers kept on between videos. That picture has outlasted almost everything she has done since, including playing Hildegard Knef and the London secretary in Love Actually who nearly wrecks her boss’s marriage over a Christmas necklace. On Apple TV she is now Carlotta Klatt, a mother who bugs her own neighbourhood to find a missing daughter, and the part fits a long habit. Makatsch keeps choosing women who refuse to stay inside the role the world has written for them, while the country goes on calling her by her old job title.

She grew up in Düsseldorf, the daughter of a primary-school teacher and Rainer Makatsch, once the goaltender of West Germany’s national ice hockey team. As a teenager she spent several months in New Mexico to sharpen her English. Back home she studied politics and sociology for four semesters at the University of Düsseldorf, then started an apprenticeship as a dressmaker and walked away from it. Nothing on that list pointed to a film set.

The door opened through VIVA, the German music channel that hired her in 1993 to host Interaktiv; she was 22, born in Düsseldorf on 13 August 1971. From August 1995 she fronted Bravo TV on RTL II, and her unscripted style made her the face of the German “Girlie” look of the decade. The limits showed fast: her late-night Heike Makatsch Show was cancelled after eight episodes in 1997 because too few people watched it.

By then she had found the exit. Detlev Buck cast her in Männerpension, released in 1996, and the performance won her the Bavarian Film Award for best young actress. Her cover of “Stand by Your Man” for the soundtrack reached number 11 in the German singles chart. German features such as Aimée & Jaguar followed before English-language producers came calling. In Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil she was Lisa Addison, the scientist whose infection turns her into one of the film’s monsters. In Richard Curtis’s Love Actually she was Mia, the secretary who sets her sights on Alan Rickman’s married office boss.

At home the parts grew heavier. Das Wunder von Lengede, a television drama about a mining disaster, won a Grimme Prize, and Makatsch carried Margarete Steiff as the founder of the toy company, who built her business from a wheelchair after polio. That performance brought a Bambi, a Bavarian TV Award and an International Emmy nomination for best actress. In the same stretch she went small: Lars Kraume’s largely improvised Keine Lieder über Liebe put her on tour with a band and inside a love triangle, and she wrote a companion book in her character’s voice, Ellens Tagebuch. She then co-wrote the screenplay of Schwesterherz with the journalist Johanna Adorján, a story of two sisters directed by Ed Herzog.

The role that tested her most was a singer. Kai Wessel’s Hilde, which premiered in the Berlinale Special section in 2009, followed Hildegard Knef through four decades up to her concert at the Berlin Philharmonie, and Makatsch spent years on singing lessons so she could record the songs herself. Reviews were mixed; the film still collected four nominations at the German Film Awards. Four years later she appeared in the Hollywood adaptation of The Book Thief as Liesel’s mother.

That last credit is the uncomfortable part of the story. Abroad, Makatsch has mostly been cast as a type: the infected scientist, the temptress in the office, the mother who hands her child to strangers in the opening minutes. English-language productions have rarely given her the kind of lead German television handed her repeatedly. Her own judgment has also misfired in public. In April 2021 she joined #allesdichtmachen, a campaign in which some 50 German actors released ironic videos about the country’s Covid restrictions. The backlash was immediate. She withdrew her clip within a day and wrote on Instagram that if she had played into the hands of right-wing demagogues, she deeply regretted it. The retreat was quick, and it left a fair question about how a performer whose early fame rested on spontaneity reads a room.

Television gave her the longest stretch of steady work. At Easter 2016 she first appeared as detective Ellen Berlinger in the Tatort special Fünf Minuten Himmel, set in Freiburg, before the character moved to Mainz. Five cases followed until SWR, the regional broadcaster behind it, shut the Mainz Tatort down, citing production costs pushed up by inflation. Her farewell, Aus dem Dunkel, aired in October 2023 and drew 7.45 million viewers, more than a quarter of the audience that night. Along the way she played a pampered television host in the Udo Jürgens musical Ich war noch niemals in New York and won a Romy in 2020 as most popular actress.

The current chapter belongs to Where’s Wanda?, Apple TV’s first German-language original series. Made by UFA Fiction and created by Oliver Lansley, it premiered in October 2024, with Makatsch and Axel Stein as Carlotta and Dedo Klatt, a couple who turn their suburb into a surveillance operation when the police investigation into their missing 17-year-old daughter, played by Lea Drinda, stalls. The second season starts on 21 October 2026, with Wanda found beside a body and suspected of murder; eight episodes roll out weekly until 9 December.

She was in a relationship with Daniel Craig from 1996 to 2004. On the set of Keine Lieder über Liebe she met the musician Max Schröder of the band Tomte, with whom she has two daughters, and she has a third daughter, born in 2015, with her partner, the actor Trystan Pütter. Since a trip to Ghana in 2006 she has been an ambassador for Oxfam, and German children know her voice from audiobooks of Mary Poppins and Die kleine Hexe.

The next steps are set. Sonja Heiss’s comedy Komplizinnen, in which Makatsch plays Liv alongside Laura Tonke and Anne Ratte-Polle, is due in German cinemas on 21 January 2027. She will also play Duchess Anna Amalia in the RTL+ series Goethe vs. Schiller and Fräulein Rottenmeier in a new Heidi for RTL and the Swiss broadcaster SRF, planned for 2027. Rottenmeier is the governess generations of children were taught to fear, a woman made entirely of rules. More than thirty years after VIVA, Makatsch gets to play the one character who would have switched that channel off.