Trine Dyrholm goes back to Dogma as the most decorated actress Denmark has

Trine Dyrholm

Photo: Sebaso / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 15, 1972 Odense, Denmark
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Who Am I, The Celebration, 3096 Days
Awards	Silver Bear · 6 Bodil

In The Guest, the first feature by Mads Mengel, Trine Dyrholm turns up at a christening party in a seaside hotel to which her own son did not invite her. Her character, Vibeke, hides behind tight curls and heavy glasses and can slide from charm to cruelty inside a single scene. The jury at Karlovy Vary gave the film two prizes. Three months later, Zentropa named her as the lead of Incidents of Intimacy, one of the films in its revival of the Dogma manifesto, playing a woman who cannot reach her own feelings and so steals objects from other people, filing them in a cupboard as an archive of intimacy.

The casting closes a loop. As a young actress she played Pia, the waitress at the family hotel in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, the first film made under the original Dogme vow of chastity. Between that film and this one she has become the most decorated performer in Danish film history, with eight Bodil awards from the national critics and a Silver Bear from Berlin. What she does with that standing is the interesting part. Lately she spends it on beginners. “I find it very inspiring to be able to help a new director find their voice,” she told Screen Anarchy at Karlovy Vary.

Music came first. The daughter of two schoolteachers, Arne and Lisbeth Dyrholm, she grew up in Odense, where she was born on 15 April 1972, and was singing with the city’s orchestra at eight and acting at Odense Teater at ten. In 1987, aged 14, she fronted the band Trine & Moonlighters at the Danish Melodi Grand Prix with “Danse i måneskin”. They came third. The song outlived the result and was later admitted to Denmark’s official Culture Canon, and a year after the contest she released an LP of songs she had written herself, Et frossent øjeblik.

The screen came before any training. Her first film, Springflod, released in 1990, cast her as Pauline, a girl in Southern Jutland who falls for the foster boy her family takes in, and at 18 she won the Bodil for best actress. Only then did she train, at the Danish National School of Theatre from 1991 to 1995. Vinterberg used her in his debut, The Greatest Heroes, and again in The Celebration, which took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

The middle of the 2000s turned her into a fixture of the Bodil ceremony, with three wins in three years. She took the prize for Annette K. Olesen’s In Your Hands, as a prisoner who may have the power to heal, then for the thriller Flies on the Wall, then for Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Soap, opposite David Dencik as the trans woman living downstairs. On stage she took on Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and won a Reumert for it. The singer had not gone anywhere either: “Avenuen”, with music by Kim Larsen, from the stage show Mr. Nice Guy, spent 135 weeks on the Danish singles chart with her voice on it.

Audiences outside Denmark began to notice her through Susanne Bier and Nikolaj Arcel. She was the doctor whose marriage is coming apart in Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, the scheming queen dowager Juliane Marie in Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair and a hairdresser recovering from cancer opposite Pierce Brosnan in Love Is All You Need. On television she was Gro, the eldest sister in The Legacy. In Vinterberg’s The Commune she played a wife who invites her husband’s lover to move into their shared house, and in 2016 she became the first Danish actress to win Berlin’s Silver Bear for best actress in a Danish film. A year later she sang every song herself as the singer Nico in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988.

May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts fixed the image that still follows her. As Anne, a respected lawyer who seduces her teenage stepson, she won another Bodil and Robert and a European Film Award nomination, and the film took the World Cinema audience award at Sundance.

That film also set a pattern worth questioning. Since then Danish cinema has kept handing her women who damage the people closest to them: Dagmar Overbye, the Copenhagen woman who ran an illegal adoption business and killed the babies left with her, in Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle; the chaotic mother in The Guest; and now the leader of a notorious free church. Abroad, the offers have been smaller than her record would suggest. In Mary & George she was the Danish-born Queen Anne at the edge of Julianne Moore‘s story, and in Rematch she played Garry Kasparov’s mother. No English-language production has yet given her a part on the scale of Anne in Queen of Hearts. She resists the label from inside the work. For The Guest, she said, “we didn’t want to name the diagnosis,” and she has said she does not like judging her characters, which may be why the monsters she plays rarely read as monsters.

The Girl with the Needle reached the Oscar shortlist and then the final five for best international feature, and in March 2026 it brought her an eighth Bodil, for best supporting performance. In Benedikt Erlingsson’s series The Danish Woman, broadcast by RÚV in January 2026 and by ARTE a month later, she plays Ditte Jensen, a retired Danish secret-service officer who moves into a Reykjavik block and starts fixing her neighbours’ lives without being asked; she also sings the show’s songs, released as an album. When Jeanette Nordahl’s Beginnings, in which she and David Dencik play a separating couple whose plans collapse after the wife’s stroke, could not close its financing, she put her own salary into it and took an executive producer credit.

She has been with the director and choreographer Niclas Bendixen since 2005, and they have a son.

The next months are already booked. The Guest is due in Danish cinemas in November, and on 19 November comes The House of the Holy Father, a docudrama by Andreas Koefoed, Adam Nielsen and Eva Mulvad in which she plays Ruth Evensen, the leader of the Faderhuset church. Then she will step into Incidents of Intimacy, the first feature by the artist Jesper Just. Dyrholm has said that Vibeke’s curls and glasses worked on her like a mask. The rules of Dogma25, as the revival is called, forbid make-up unless the story calls for it, so on this set she will have to work without one.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Danish cinema, Thomas Vinterberg, Trine Dyrholm, Queen of Hearts

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