Nastassia Kinski Exposed

She is Hard to pin down, perhaps because success has driven her all over the map, from Munich and London to Rome and L.A., for starters. As an international nomad--and, arguably, the hardest-working Wunderkind in world cinema right now--Nastassia Kinski keeps a small flat in Paris, has recently leased a hideaway in the Bahamas and owns another apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park. Which is not where she receives members of the press, at least not for the moment. "It's a mess," she says nonchalantly, flopping into an easy chair while waiting for room service in the Park Avenue hotel suite that will be home for the next several days. She means that the apartment's a mess because she's had no time to fix it up or buy things. The hotel suite is a mess, too, cluttered with flowers, cards, scripts, photographs, coffee cups and what all.

Nastassia herself might be called a mess, but not by any sensitive observer. Slender and tawny, wearing jeans and a loose, oversize (continued on page 150) Nastassia Kinski Exposed (continued from page 146) man's shirt, quick-witted but wary, she casts intelligent-fawn eyes over every new subject as if to see whether or not the questions are loaded. She's the kind of irresistible mess that makes poets reach for their pens and would have sent Renoir rushing to his easel.

Ask her about being a world-class celebrity, frequently compared with such luminous ladies as Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn and Greta Garbo, and she looks bemused. "This question comes up all the time, and I hate it. I don't know what to do with it, what to say. They're all wonderful. Maybe there's a similar something that comes out through your pores, your eyes. Maybe it's just being a woman who has glanced at things on the same planet where they lived; I dunno. My idol for a long time was and still is Romy Schneider. And Marilyn Monroe; she always moved me, whatever she did. I could watch her movies forever. Whether you were a dog or a cat or a woman or a guy, you just loved her. There was something you could see on her skin, a glow; she was so alive and exciting...."

The moment an idea excites her, Nastassia is on the move, flinging arms, legs and torso any which way to emphasize a point. "When I'm really down sometimes, thinking I'm no good, I'll say to myself, 'Wait a minute, there's still your mother, there's Dostoievsky and there's Marilyn Monroe.' That's one way I can just lighten myself, you know, on those bad days." You think for a split second that you've been thrown a curve, the kind you get from a Vegas showgirl who claims she's into heavy literature, such as "Chekhov's War and Peace." But Nastassia is currently reading Proust. Really.

The insecurity she mentions seems unrelated to her impressive track record. At the age of 22, Kinski has a string of credits that aren't all pearls but sound pretty dazzling even so. She made a movie you never heard about with Germany's Wim Wenders when she was still a teeny-bopper, worked in German TV with Wolfgang Petersen (who directed Das Bool), co-starred at 17 with Marcello Mastroianni in an Italian movie, became an international star in Roman Polanski's Tess, then did Francis Coppola's One from the Heart, followed by Paul Schrader's Cat People. By the time you read this, she will be brightening the screen opposite Rudolf Nureyev in James Toback's Exposed (see review, page 38).

Toback, who doubles as her partner in the accompanying Helmut Newton pictorial, is a staunch ally and Kinski confidant who states, "Nastassia, alone among young actresses today, projects the quality of erotic mystery that has distinguished all the great femmes fatales of cinema: Dietrich, Garbo, Bardot, Deneuve. But in my film, I feel she also shows for the first time an accessible quality--she makes you feel that you could know her and she could know you."

By fall, there'll be another new movie, in French--The Moon in the Gutter, co-starring France's top male star, Gerard Depardieu, and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, whose stylish Diva became the hottest Parisian import of 1982. Beineix sings her praises on a hotline from abroad while putting finishing touches on Gutter. Bien sÛr, no director with his head on straight is likely to lambaste his leading lady, but Jean-Jacques eulogizes Nastassia well beyond the call of duty. "In my movie," says he, "she's a queen in the trash, dressed by Dior and driving a red Ferrari, with a world of dirt, despair and ugliness around her. She has to be perverse, tender, sweet and cruel--the eternal feminine. It's complex, but Nastassia is a dream and totally professional, demanding a lot from a director and never quite satisfied, because she gives you everything from herself, every time ... until you have to stop her, finally, and ask her to save something for the next take. She's a star, which in my language means more than being an actress or having technique. It's that something special, a gift from God. Like Garbo, like Monroe. She's one of them."

Brace yourself. Also on the way for late 1983 is Unfaithfully Yours, teaming Nastassia with Dudley Moore in a remake of the 1948 Preston Sturges comedy about a symphony conductor who suspects his beautiful wife of infidelity. Kinski a comedienne? Director Howard Zieff (his credits range from Slither and House Calls to Private Benjamin) admits he had trouble convincing the studio chiefs that the girl from Tess and Cat People could project a sense of humor: "I was convinced after I met with her for half an hour, almost a year before we began shooting. She's so surprisingly effervescent, ebullient, full of vivacity. We've changed the role a lot. She's now an Italian movie actress married to Dudley. Her part is filled with energy, she really has to go, and she's fabulous; everything is happening so easily I'm in shock. She reminds you of a 19-year-old Ingrid Bergman or, sometimes--when she's full out--like Sophia Loren in her prime. She's so young, so amazing, with phenomenal eyes. I can't see her going anywhere but onward to major stardom."

The votes tallied might suggest a fairytale princess who consistently gets what she wants and has the talent to make the most of it. At another encounter, over drinks and snacks in a spacious hotel lounge, Nastassia tries to cut her image down to size. She's wearing soft wool slacks with a delicate pinkish embroidered blouse she bought in the Bahamas and looks about 16 but wishes it known that she suffers disappointments like everyone else. Two roles she really wanted went to Elizabeth McGovern: first, that of Evelyn Nesbit in Milos Forman's Ragtime, the part that won McGovern an Oscar nomination ("Milos decided, I think, that my English wasn't quite right"), then the female lead in Lovesick, opposite Dudley Moore. "The first time we met, Elizabeth and I both had uncomfortable vibes about it, but the second time was OK."

Her English, by now, is nigh-perfect, with a mere trace of Continental rhythm, and Unfaithfully Yours promises to set things right re Dudley. Fluent in four languages, she notes with relish, "In this movie, I get to curse in an Italian accent. I love slang, but I especially love to curse in Italian, you know? We used to live in Rome when I was little, and my father cursed all day, all the time. He cursed the traffic, cursed about money, cursed everybody. I found out that cursing can feel so good."

When she speaks of her father, of course, she's speaking of Klaus Kinski--a superstar nonpareil in Germany, recently praised in Fitzcarraldo and known to audiences in distant corners of the globe where Nastassia has yet to raise any dust. Her parents broke up when she was eight, and Nastassia lived with her mother, who manages her career to this day. "We're like sisters," she says warmly. A couple of years ago, any question about her father would have been deflected, but she has mellowed on that subject. "I think I rejected my father because I loved him so much. My parents were like gods to me. We were always so close. He wanted us to have the best of everything, wanted my mother to live beautifully. When you're small, you know, you want a sort of banal childhood--everything ordinary and planned. It wasn't that way, but I had a wonderful childhood, and that's something you hold on to, which I just carry within me. My parents always listened to me, which is very important. To treat children as whole human beings; they always did that.

"But my father, since a few years ago, has really cut himself off. I mean, he does movies, but he's just way out there ... (concluded on page 162) Nastassia Kinski Exposed (continued from page 150) nowhere. I think he wanted to do certain things he cared about or just get a boat and sail far away from everybody. He was so full of fire when he was young. He wanted to play Paganini. But he always had to compromise a lot, sometimes did the most stupid movies just to keep us happy and make money. I don't know...." Nastassia shrugs, her voice trailing off wistfully. She has a half sister, Pola--also an actress, though their paths seldom cross--as well as a very young half brother by Kinski's current wife, a Vietnamese.

It's clear that she sees many things differently now that she has to juggle her own conflicting drives. Her workaholic tendencies are such that she took advantage of a break from The Moon in the Gutter to make still another movie in Germany, portraying pianist Clara Schumann. "Classical music, to me--I mean Beethoven or Tchaikovsky or Chopin--is like hearing the voices of my parents; I was brought up on it. But I never knew so much about Schumann or how the Schumanns fell in love through their art, which drew them together so strongly."

An unabashed romantic, she is also a solitary soul who spent Christmas alone in the Bahamas and wondered why anyone thought it odd of her. She may dig an occasional evening of disco but cherishes privacy, and she's still not sure she wants to be an actress. "That's why I'm acting, just to follow this work and see how far it goes, to say all these marvelous things and be all these strange people in different stories. I can't tell you things I don't know, but I finally want what everybody wants. Mostly, I want children...."

Does that mean marriage? She has thought about it, though the possibility seems remote right now. And details about a prospective mate are hard to come by. "He's 25 ... he lives in Berlin ... he's a student of architecture." Next question.

She's still carrying psychological bruises from her early encounters with journalists when she was too inexperienced to field queries about her widely publicized romances with Polanski and Schrader. About Schrader and Cat People, Nastassia prefers to stay mum. The movie disappointed her, and so did the relationship. "They say if something bugs you, you still care," she concedes, then adds, "and it really bugs me that I was so stupid."

Polanski is something else. "Tess was truly a turning point for me, and the relationship while I was working with Polanski was fantastic. Don't call him the love of my life, because that's not what I mean. Because he has a certain kind of reputation, people used to ask such nasty questions, try to get me to say things, then they'd just go and write what they wanted to write. But I love Polanski as a person, as a human being. I can't think of a thing in this world that would not interest him. He totally fascinated me and has been the most important man I've met, except for my father. I've never seen anybody so excited by life who has in him what we love about children--just to look and ask and touch and wonder. He'd have soup served to him and smell it and say, 'You must smell this soup ... this soup is amazing!" Every instant with him is just full. Nobody I know is like him. He's wonderful."

Whenever she talks about the people she likes best--whether Coppola or Toback or Polanski--she is apt to give them extra points for taking chances. That she relishes an element of risk seems obvious even when she talks about the celebrated snake picture by Richard Avedon in which Kinski had a live python wrapped around her nude body and became a best-selling-poster queen. "That was totally unplanned. I knew the guy from Cat People, a trainer who came to a fashion shooting with a monkey, a bird, a cat, different animals. If I had thought about it for a day or two, I might have been frightened by the whole idea of a snake, but the python was there--then Avedon said, 'Well, you'll just have to take everything off or this is going to look ridiculous.' So that's what we did."

Nastassia draws a sharper analogy from her role as a circus high-wire walker in Coppola's One from the Heart, an experience she cherishes no matter what critics and public say. She had to walk a wire 50 feet above the ground and wouldn't fake it, couldn't fake it--although there were what she calls mattresses to cushion a fall. To get the stunt right, she trained for months with circus professionals. "The discipline of walking a wire is very difficult, you know. Gravity pulls you down all the time. It's like you're pulled on an inner wire from your own center ... you make love to the wire and feel the north, south, west, everything of yourself. It's incredible. The minute your mind goes somewhere else, you slip. I slipped quite often, badly, and that hurt. Then I realized maybe I was trying too hard. So I tried with less effort; and later, I related that to acting. Maybe putting in too much effort is what blocks you. Anyway, to walk that wire was like a lesson from life, if you know what I mean." We know.

The laws of gravity may be immutable, yet all available evidence suggests that enchanting Nastassia Kinski henceforth has only one way to go: up, up, up.

"In this movie, I get to curse in an Italian accent. I especially love to curse in Italian, you know?"

"'Tess' was truly a turning point, and the relationship while I was working with Polanski was fantastic."