Vicky Krieps, the actress who plays only women who refuse

Vicky Krieps

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

Born	October 4, 1983 Hesperange, Luxembourg
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Phantom Thread, Colonia, Hanna
Awards	Cannes Un Certain Regard Best Performance Prize · European Film · Austrian Film · TIFF Tribute Performer · Deutscher Fernsehpreis Best Actress · Karlovy Vary International Film Festival President's

There is a particular kind of performance that operates entirely in the body’s resistance. Not the dramatic refusal delivered in a speech, but the quieter, more persistent kind — the way someone continues to occupy their own life even when everything around them is designed to convince them they cannot. Vicky Krieps has made that resistance the center of her craft. In Phantom Thread she turned it against Daniel Day-Lewis’s tyrannical couturier; in Corsage she turned it against the Habsburg court’s idea of what a middle-aged empress should look like; in Love Me Tender she turned it against a family court’s definition of maternal fitness. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidental.

Krieps was born in Hesperange, a small municipality south of Luxembourg City, into a family with a specific relationship to culture and resistance. Her grandfather, Robert Krieps, was a wartime resistance fighter who later served as Luxembourg’s Minister of Justice and Culture; her father, Bob Krieps, ran the Luxembourg Film Fund and later directed the Ministry of Culture. The connections were never coercive — she has spoken of coming to theatre relatively late, via a detour through languages and music — but they were ambient. She trained at the Conservatoire de Luxembourg and then at the Zurich University of the Arts, where she worked at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Born in 1983, she spent her formative years in a small country that takes cinema seriously precisely because it has so little of its own.

Her early screen career — regional TV dramas, a recurring role in the naval series Das Boot — was solid, professional work that nobody outside the German-speaking world noticed. Then Paul Thomas Anderson cast her in Phantom Thread in 2017, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in his purported final film role, and Krieps did something critics had not quite expected: she made Alma the most interesting person in the room. Day-Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock is the film’s announced subject, the obsessive couturier whose dressmaking is inseparable from his need to control. But Krieps’s Alma gradually, deliberately, turns the power dynamic inside out — most memorably in the scene where she poisons his eggs, which the film frames not as transgression but as the only grammar of intimacy available to her. Critics noted she could “hold her own opposite a titan.” The observation was accurate but slightly misread the dynamic. She was not holding her own against him. She was outmaneuvering him.

The four years that followed demonstrated the deliberateness of her choices. M. Night Shyamalan’s horror film Old and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island arrived the same year, 2021, neither a safe sequel to Phantom Thread’s success, both asking different things of her. Mathieu Amalric’s French film Hold Me Tight required her to carry a narrative that withholds its own logic, playing a woman whose grief refuses the shape grief is supposed to take. None of these were the obvious choices that follow a breakthrough in a prestige English-language film — and their cumulative effect was to make it impossible to reduce her to a single performance.

The performance that crystallized her international reputation was Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer in 2022, in which Krieps played Empress Elisabeth of Austria at forty — the age at which the Habsburg court expected her to begin her official withdrawal from visibility. Krieps’s Elisabeth does not withdraw. She slips anachronistic Queen songs into the costume drama, stages her own death, refuses to have her waist measured. The film won the Best Performance Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and the European Film Award for Best Actress. It was the kind of success that can flatten a career — one triumph that defines everything after — but Krieps moved on before it could.

There is an argument, rarely made directly because it sounds like a complaint about success, that the industry’s enthusiasm for Krieps’s refusal performances is itself a kind of containment. She is praised, consistently, for playing women who resist — but the praise operates as its own frame: the actress who specializes in resistance, the European who keeps defying American cinema’s categories. The risk is that the frame becomes as fixed as the corset Corsage refuses. Krieps appears aware of this. The five films she completed in 2025 — including Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother and the Ryan Murphy production Monster: The Ed Gein Story — cover genres and registers that do not cohere into a single brand. The breadth reads as strategic.

Her most significant 2025 work was Love Me Tender, which premiered at Cannes and earned her a nomination for the European Film Award for Best Actress — her second nomination in three years. The film, a French drama about custody and desire, places her against a legal system whose definition of maternal fitness cannot accommodate the full complexity of a woman’s life. The territory is familiar. The execution felt new. In 2025 she was also elected president of the German Film Academy, an institutional role that carries weight beyond any single production — and that situates her, at forty-two, as a figure who shapes the industry as well as acts within it.

In May 2025, Krieps married Greek film production assistant Lazaros Gounaridis, whom she met during filming of Hot Milk in Chalkidiki, Greece, in 2023. She has two children from her relationship with director Jonas Laux.

In 2026 she stars as Bridget Sullivan, the maid central to the Lizzie Borden murders, in Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story for Netflix, and appears in Anat Yuta Zuria’s Diamond. A role in Bradley Cooper’s Ocean’s Eleven prequel is scheduled for 2027. Three very different productions from three very different directors — which is, by now, recognizably the point.