Vicky Krieps: The Life Story Behind Luxembourg's Star

Luxembourg has about 650,000 people, which is fewer than live in a single district of Paris, and it has produced almost no international film stars. Vicky Krieps is the exception, and the way she became one is unusual enough to be worth telling first, before the childhood and the training. In 2017, she was cast as Alma Elson in Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about a dressmaker in 1950s London, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in the role he announced would be his last. Krieps had never carried a film of that size, she had never worked in English at that level, and almost nobody outside German-language cinema knew her name. Anderson cast her after a screen test, and Day-Lewis, who was famously particular about his co-stars, worked with her through a long rehearsal process in which the two actors learned to cook, to sew, and to live inside the world of the film. When Phantom Thread opened, critics did not talk about Krieps as a newcomer who had been lucky. They talked about her as an equal, a performer who had held her own against one of the most acclaimed actors alive and made the film hers. That is a rare thing to happen to anyone, and it is rarer still when it happens to an actress from a country most filmgoers could not find on a map.

Alma Elson: the Waitress Who Would Not Be Controlled

Phantom Thread is set in London in the 1950s, and its story is a strange, dark love story. Reynolds Woodcock, played by Day-Lewis, is a dressmaker who creates clothes for royalty and high society, and who lives a rigid, controlled life with his sister Cyril. Alma is a young waitress he meets in a restaurant in the countryside, and she becomes his muse, his lover, and eventually his wife. What makes the character remarkable is that Alma refuses to be a muse in the passive sense. She watches Woodcock, she learns his habits, she challenges his control, and she finds a way — through poisoned mushrooms, in a sequence that audiences still argue about — to make him need her. Krieps plays all of this with a stillness that is easy to miss if you are watching Day-Lewis, and that is the point: Alma’s power is quiet, and it grows as the film goes on. The performance earned her widespread praise, and the film itself was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning Best Costume Design. For Krieps, the film changed the terms of her career overnight. Before it, she was a working actress in German and Luxembourg films. After it, directors in Britain, France, and America knew her name, and the offers that arrived were for leading roles rather than supporting ones. She has said that the experience taught her to trust her own instincts, because Anderson gave her room to find Alma herself rather than telling her how to play the part.

Luxembourg City, a Politician Grandfather, and Leaving Home

Luxembourg City, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, gives 4 October 1983 as Vicky Krieps’s birth date, and the family she was born into was deeply involved in the public life of the country. Her grandfather, Robert Krieps, was a Luxembourg politician who served as a minister and as a member of parliament, a public figure in a country small enough that public figures are known by sight. The household valued education and public service, and Krieps grew up with a sense of the wider world that came partly from living in a country where three languages — Luxembourgish, French, and German — are used every day. Luxembourg is a trilingual country, and a child growing up there learns early that the same thought can be expressed in different languages, and that different languages carry different ways of thinking. That early experience is directly relevant to her career, because she has worked in German, French, and English, and she moves between them in a way that few actors can. She left Luxembourg to train as an actress, which was itself a decision: there is no large film industry at home, and an actress from Luxembourg who wants to work has to leave. She went to Switzerland, and the choice of where to train would shape the next decade of her life.

Zurich, the Schauspielhaus, and Learning to Listen

Krieps trained at the Zurich University of the Arts, in Switzerland, and after graduating she worked in theatre, including at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, one of the most respected theatres in the German-speaking world. Theatre training in the German tradition is different from the British or American kind: it places a strong emphasis on the ensemble, on the actor’s ability to listen to the other performers on stage, and on a kind of stillness that lets the audience come to the performance rather than chasing it. Krieps has spoken about learning to be still on stage, and that stillness is visible in her films: she does not rush a scene, she does not signal her emotions, and she lets the camera find her. The theatre years were long, and they were not glamorous, but they gave her a technique that screen actors who come straight from drama school sometimes lack: the ability to hold a scene with almost no movement at all. She worked in German theatre for years before her film career took off, and the discipline of that work is one reason directors trust her with difficult parts. A director who casts Krieps knows that she will arrive prepared, that she will listen, and that she will not try to steal a scene from the other actors in it.

Gutland, The Young Karl Marx, and Two Films in One Year

The year 2017 brought Krieps to international attention twice before Phantom Thread even opened. In Gutland, a Luxembourg film directed by Govinda Van Maele, she played Lucy, a young woman who arrives in a small village and disrupts it, a part that required her to be both an outsider and a catalyst. The film is a strange, dark story about a community that hides a secret, and Krieps’s Lucy is the person who forces the secret into the open. In the same year she appeared in The Young Karl Marx, directed by Raoul Peck, playing Jenny von Westphalen, the wife of Karl Marx. Jenny was a real person, a woman from a wealthy family who married Marx and shared his political life, and the part required Krieps to play a woman who was both a wife and an intellectual partner, someone who understood Marx’s ideas and argued with him about them. The two films could hardly be more different — one a small Luxembourg drama, the other a historical film about one of the most influential thinkers in history — and the fact that Krieps carried both in the same year showed a range that casting directors noticed. She could work in German, in French, and in English, and she could move between a village drama and a period epic without losing her footing. That range is what made her a credible choice for Phantom Thread, and it is what has kept her working since.

Corsage: Empress Elisabeth and the Cannes Prize

If Phantom Thread made Krieps famous, Corsage made her an award-winning leading actress. The film, directed by Marie Kreutzer and released in 2022, tells the story of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, in the year she turned forty, a moment when the most beautiful woman in Europe began to resist the role that had been forced on her. Krieps played Elisabeth as a woman who is bored, angry, and determined to be free, and the performance is physical in a way her earlier work was not: she rides, she fences, she starves herself, and she looks directly at the camera as if daring the audience to judge her. The film was shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival, and Krieps won the Best Actress award in that section, a major honour that put her name alongside the most acclaimed performers of the year. The prize mattered because it was not for a supporting role or for a film carried by a famous co-star; it was for a performance in which she was the centre of every scene, and it proved that Phantom Thread had not been a one-off. She has since appeared in Bergman Island in 2021, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, playing Chris, a filmmaker on the island of Fårö, and in Old in 2021, M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller about a beach that makes people age rapidly, playing Prisca, a mother watching her children grow old in a single day. She also appeared in Hold Me Tight in 2021 and in More Than Ever in 2022, films that continued the pattern of choosing directors she admired over projects that were simply large.

Three Languages, Two Children, and Choosing the Work Herself

Krieps lives in Berlin, and she has two children with her partner, the German actor Jonas Laux, a fact she has discussed in interviews about the difficulty of balancing a film career with family life. She speaks Luxembourgish, German, French, and English, and the languages are not a party trick; they are the working tools of her career, and they let her take parts that other actresses cannot. She has said that she chooses her work carefully, and that she is interested in films that say something about the world rather than in films that are simply large. That attitude explains why her filmography is not longer than it is: she has turned down work, and she has waited for the right directors, and the result is a list of films that is unusually strong for an actress of her age. She is still in her early forties, and the career that began in Luxembourg, passed through Zurich, and arrived in London and Cannes is still developing. The most interesting thing about her is not that she came from a small country, but that she has never let the small country define her. She works in four languages, in three film industries, and in roles that range from a waitress to an empress, and the through-line is not where she comes from but how she works: quietly, carefully, and with a stillness that makes the audience lean in.

Bergman Island, Old, and the Art of Choosing Directors

The films Krieps made around Corsage show how deliberately she picks her collaborators. Bergman Island, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve and released in 2021, is set on Fårö, the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked, and Krieps plays Chris, a filmmaker who travels there with her partner and finds that the island stirs up questions about her own work and her own marriage. The film is quiet, reflective, and full of long conversations, and Krieps’s performance is built out of listening: she listens to her partner, she listens to the island, and she listens to herself, and the audience watches a woman thinking. Old, released the same year and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, could hardly be more different: a thriller about a beach where people age a year every half hour, in which Krieps plays Prisca, a mother who watches her children become adults in a single afternoon. The part required her to show a woman ageing rapidly while trying to protect her family, and the film’s high concept gave her a chance to work in a genre she had never tried. That she made both films in the same period, and that both are credible, shows the range that directors keep coming back to. She also appeared in Hold Me Tight, directed by Mathieu Amalric, and in More Than Ever, directed by Emily Atef, films that are small, French, and character-driven, the kind of work that does not make headlines but does make reputations among directors. The pattern is consistent: she works with filmmakers she respects, in stories that interest her, and she does not seem to care whether the film will be large.

What Luxembourg Means to Her Now

Krieps has spoken about Luxembourg in interviews with a mixture of affection and realism. She is proud of where she comes from, and she has said that growing up in a small, trilingual country gave her a sense of the world that a childhood in a large country might not have given. At the same time, she is clear that Luxembourg could not have given her a film career, and that leaving was not a rejection but a necessity. She returns for films like Gutland, and she has supported Luxembourg cinema when she can, but her career is international in a way that has nothing to do with her passport. The interesting thing about her relationship with her home country is that it is not a marketing story. She does not present herself as the girl from Luxembourg who conquered Hollywood, because she has not conquered Hollywood and does not seem to want to. She presents herself as an actress who happens to be from Luxembourg, and who works in Berlin, Paris, and London because that is where the films are. That modesty is part of why she is trusted by directors: she does not bring a national narrative to a set, she brings herself, and she lets the work speak. As Luxembourg’s film industry grows, partly because of the attention she has brought to it, her story may become a template for other young actors from small countries, but she herself has never treated it as one. She simply left, learned her craft, and came back when there was a film worth coming back for.

Hanna, The Dead Don’t Hurt, and the Long Road to Corsage

Before Phantom Thread, Krieps had a small part in the 2011 thriller Hanna, directed by Joe Wright, playing Johanna Zadek, a woman who helps the young assassin at the centre of the story. The part was small, and it did not make her famous, but it put her in a film with a major director, and it showed that she could work in English, in a genre film, alongside actors like Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett. Small parts in large films are a normal part of a young actor’s career, and they matter because they teach the actor how a big production works, and because they put the actor in front of directors who may remember them later. Krieps has said that the early years were slow, and that she took the work that came, and that she learned from each job, even the small ones. The patience of those years is part of why Phantom Thread worked: she had already learned how to be on a set, how to listen to a director, and how to do the job without fuss, and when the large role came, she was ready for it.

In 2023 she starred in The Dead Don’t Hurt, a western directed by Viggo Mortensen, playing Vivienne Le Coudy, a French-Canadian woman who lives in Nevada in the 1860s with a Danish immigrant, played by Mortensen, and who must survive on her own when he leaves to fight in the Civil War. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it is a quiet, old-fashioned western, full of long landscapes and small conversations, and Krieps’s performance is the centre of it. Vivienne is a woman who is independent, stubborn, and determined to live her life on her own terms, and the part required Krieps to play a character who is, in many ways, the opposite of Alma in Phantom Thread: Alma is quiet and watchful, Vivienne is outspoken and fierce. The contrast showed a range that casting directors noticed, and the film was praised for its writing and its performances. Working with Mortensen, who is both the director and the co-star, was a test, and Krieps passed it: she held her own opposite an actor who has been nominated for three Academy Awards, and the chemistry between them was the reason the film worked. The Dead Don’t Hurt is the most recent evidence that Krieps is not a one-film actress, and that her career is still developing, in directions that are interesting and unexpected.

The road to Corsage was long, and it is worth remembering that Krieps was in her late thirties when the film made her an award-winning leading actress. Most actresses who become famous do so in their twenties, and the ones who do not often give up. Krieps did not give up, and the reason is the same as the reason she survived the early years: she kept working, she kept choosing directors she admired, and she kept trusting that the right role would come. Corsage came, and the Cannes prize came with it, and the career that had been built slowly, film by film, suddenly looked like a career that had been planned all along. It had not been planned; it had been built, patiently, by an actress who knew what she wanted and who was willing to wait for it. The Dead Don’t Hurt is the latest step on that road, and it suggests that the next decade will be as interesting as the last one, because Krieps is still choosing the work she cares about, and she is still doing it well.

The Prizes After Corsage: the European Nomination and the César

She was nominated for the European Film Award for Best Actress for Corsage, a nomination that put her alongside the most acclaimed performers in Europe. She was also nominated for the César Award for Best Actress for Hold Me Tight, the film directed by Mathieu Amalric in which she played a woman who leaves her family, a nomination that showed the French film industry took her seriously as a leading actress. These nominations arrived together, in the same period, which is often how recognition works: slowly, and then all at once, after years of work that nobody noticed.

Bergman Island was filmed on Fårö, the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked for many years, and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. Krieps played Chris, a filmmaker who travels to the island with her partner, played by Tim Roth, and who finds that the island stirs up questions about her own work and her own marriage. The film is quiet and reflective, full of long conversations, and Krieps’s performance is built out of listening: she listens to her partner, she listens to the island, and she listens to herself, and the audience watches a woman thinking. Filming on Fårö, where Bergman’s presence is still felt in every house and every landscape, gave the film a particular atmosphere, and Krieps has said the island affected the way she worked. It is the kind of film that does not explain itself, and that trusts the audience to pay attention, and Krieps’s performance is the reason that trust is repaid.

My Take:

The first thing I want to say about Vicky Krieps is that Phantom Thread should not have worked for her, and the fact that it did is the most impressive thing in her career. Think about the situation: Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most demanding directors alive, casts an actress almost nobody outside Germany has heard of, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor so intense that he stays in character for months, in a film that lives or dies on the chemistry between two people. If Krieps had been weak, the film would have collapsed, and her career would have collapsed with it. She was not weak. She was, by most accounts, an equal, and the film’s reputation rests as much on her as it does on Day-Lewis. That is not luck. That is the result of years of theatre training in Zurich, years of small films in Luxembourg and Germany, and a technique built on stillness and listening. The stillness is the key. Most actors, faced with Day-Lewis, would have tried to match his intensity. Krieps did the opposite: she stayed still, she watched, and she let the audience come to her. It worked, and it is a lesson in how to act opposite a great performer without being swallowed by them.

Corsage is the film I would show someone who wants to understand what Krieps can do when she is the centre of the story, because it is a performance with almost no safety net. She is in every scene, the film’s success depends entirely on her, and the character is difficult: Elisabeth of Austria is beautiful, bored, furious, and self-destructive, and the film asks the audience to sympathise with a woman who is also, by any ordinary measure, a terrible mother and a difficult wife. Krieps does not soften any of that. She plays Elisabeth as a person who is suffocating inside a role she never chose, and the physicality of the performance — the riding, the fencing, the starvation — makes the suffocation visible. The Cannes prize in Un Certain Regard was deserved, and it mattered because it was not a prize for being in a good film. It was a prize for carrying one. That distinction is important, and it is the reason I think Corsage, not Phantom Thread, is the film that proves her.

What I admire most about her career is the languages, and I mean that in a practical sense, not as a compliment about being clever. Speaking Luxembourgish, German, French, and English means she can work in four film industries, and it means she can take parts that other actresses cannot even audition for. The Young Karl Marx required German and French. Phantom Thread required English. Corsage required German. Gutland required Luxembourgish. That is not a coincidence; it is a career strategy, whether she planned it that way or not, and it is a strategy that only works because she is genuinely fluent, not because she learned a few lines phonetically. The multilingual career is also a form of insurance: if one industry slows down, she can work in another, and if one kind of film stops being made, she can make a different kind. Most actors are dependent on a single market. Krieps has four, and that freedom shows in the choices she makes, because she does not have to take a bad job to stay employed.

Her choice of directors is the other thing that stands out. Look at the names: Paul Thomas Anderson, Raoul Peck, Marie Kreutzer, Mia Hansen-Løve, M. Night Shyamalan, Mathieu Amalric. These are not the directors who make the largest films; they are the directors who make the most interesting ones, and Krieps has worked with them because she wanted to, not because she had to. That is a pattern that takes discipline, because the interesting directors do not always pay well, and the films they make do not always succeed. But the pattern has a payoff: a filmography that is unusually strong, with almost no weak entries, and a reputation among directors that keeps the offers coming. I think that reputation is the most valuable thing she owns, more valuable than any single award, because it means the next good script will come to her before it goes to anyone else.

If I have a criticism, it is that she is still underused in English-language cinema. Phantom Thread showed what she could do in English, and then the English-language offers did not arrive in the numbers they should have. Old was a start, but it was a genre film, and Bergman Island was a French production. I would like to see her in a major English-language drama, playing a contemporary character, with a director who gives her the same room Anderson gave her. The fact that it has not happened yet is not her failure; it is the failure of an industry that is slow to recognise actresses who do not fit a familiar mould. She is not a Hollywood type, she is not a British type, and she is not a French type. She is a Luxembourg actress who works in four languages, and the industry does not always know what to do with that. I hope it figures it out, because the talent is obvious to anyone who watches her work.

The family background is worth mentioning, but I want to be careful not to overstate it. Her grandfather was a politician, and the household valued public service, and that probably gave her a confidence that other young actors lack. But a politician grandfather does not teach you to act, and it does not get you cast opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. What got her cast was the work: the years in Zurich, the years on stage, the years in small films. The background is interesting, but it is not the story. The story is the work, and the work is what she should be judged by. I think she would agree with that, because she has never made a fuss about her family, and she has always talked about her career in terms of the directors and the films rather than in terms of where she came from.

Looking ahead, I think Krieps is in a strong position, and I think the next decade could be her best. She is in her early forties, she has a Cannes prize, she has the respect of the directors who matter, and she has the languages to work anywhere. The only thing she needs is the right scripts, and those tend to come to actresses who have proved they can carry a film. She has proved it twice now, in Phantom Thread and in Corsage, and the industry has noticed. If she gets a great contemporary role in the next few years, the kind of role that defines a career, I will not be surprised. And if she does not, and she keeps making small, interesting films with directors she admires, that will be a fine career too, because it will be hers, chosen by her, in the languages she speaks, in the countries she lives between. The girl from Luxembourg City who left home to learn her craft has become an actress who belongs everywhere and nowhere, and that is a rare and valuable thing to be.

For anyone discovering her now, start with Phantom Thread, because you have to, but watch her in it, not Day-Lewis. Notice the stillness, notice the way she listens, notice the moment when Alma stops being a waitress and starts being the person in charge. Then watch Corsage, and notice how different Elisabeth is from Alma, even though the same actress plays both. Those two films, taken together, give you the full range, and they show you why directors keep calling her. After that, watch Gutland, which is the film that shows where she came from, and Bergman Island, which shows where she is going. If you watch all four, you will understand why a small country produced a major actress, and why the major actress is still, in the best sense, a small-country person: quiet, careful, and unwilling to shout to be heard.

The Dead Don’t Hurt is the film I would point to if someone asked me whether Krieps has grown since Corsage, because Vivienne is the opposite of Elisabeth in almost every way. Elisabeth is a queen who is suffocating inside a role she never chose, and Vivienne is a woman who chooses her own life, in a place where there is almost nothing to choose from, and who survives by being stubborn and fierce. Krieps played Vivienne with an outspokenness that Alma never had, and the performance showed a range that Phantom Thread only hinted at. Working with Viggo Mortensen, who directed the film and played her partner, was a test, because Mortensen is an actor who has been nominated for three Academy Awards, and who is known for being demanding, and Krieps held her own opposite him. The film premiered at Toronto, and it was praised for its writing and its performances, and it is the most recent evidence that Krieps is not a one-film actress. She is an actress who keeps choosing directors she admires, and who keeps doing the work well, and the next decade will show whether the industry gives her the leading roles she deserves.

The small part in Hanna is worth a word, because it shows how long the road was. She played Johanna Zadek, a woman who helps a young assassin, in a film directed by Joe Wright, with Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett, and the part was small, but it put her in a film with a major director, and it taught her how a big production works. Most actors have a version of that story: a small part in a large film, a few days on set, a credit that nobody notices, and a lesson that stays with them. Krieps took the lesson, and she kept working, and when the large role came, in Phantom Thread, she was ready for it. That readiness is the most important fact about her career, and it is the reason I think she has lasted where other actresses who broke through faster have faded. A fast breakthrough gives you fame before you have learned how to handle it. A slow one gives you the craft first, and the fame second, and the craft is what keeps you employed when the fame cools.

There is one more thing to say about the languages, because they are not only a practical advantage but a way of thinking. Growing up in Luxembourg, where three languages are used every day, teaches a child that the same thought can be expressed in different ways, and that different languages carry different ways of seeing the world. Krieps has carried that lesson into her career, and it shows in the way she works: she listens in German, she argues in French, she acts in English, and she moves between them without effort. Most actors are dependent on a single language, and when that language’s industry slows down, they have nowhere to go. Krieps has four languages, and that freedom shows in her choices, because she does not have to take a bad job to stay employed. It also shows in her performances, because acting in a second or third language requires a different kind of attention, and the attention makes the performance more precise. I think that is a rare and valuable thing, and it is the reason her career will last.

The nominations that followed Corsage are worth one final word, because they show how quickly recognition can arrive after a long wait. The European Film Award nomination for Best Actress, and the César nomination for Hold Me Tight, came in the same period, and they put Krieps alongside the most acclaimed performers in Europe and in France. That is often how recognition works: slowly, and then all at once, after years of work that nobody noticed. Krieps did not chase the nominations, and she has never made a fuss about them, which is consistent with everything else about her: the work first, the recognition second, and the languages kept close throughout. That is a rare attitude, and it is the reason directors trust her: they know she is there for the film, not for the prize.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Vicky Krieps get cast in Phantom Thread?

She won the role of Alma Elson through a screen test for director Paul Thomas Anderson, and she worked opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in the role he announced would be his last. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won Best Costume Design.

Who was Vicky Krieps’s grandfather?

Her grandfather was Robert Krieps, a Luxembourg politician who served as a minister and as a member of parliament. Krieps grew up in Luxembourg City in a household that valued education and public service.

What award did Vicky Krieps win at Cannes for Corsage?

She won the Best Actress award in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for playing Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer. The film follows Elisabeth in the year she turned forty.

How many languages does Vicky Krieps speak?

She speaks Luxembourgish, German, French, and English. Growing up in Luxembourg, a trilingual country, gave her the languages that now let her work across German, French, and English-language cinema.

What did Vicky Krieps do before Phantom Thread?

She trained at the Zurich University of the Arts and worked in theatre, including at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Her early films included Gutland and The Young Karl Marx, both released in 2017, the same year as Phantom Thread.

Where does Vicky Krieps live, and does she have children?

She lives in Berlin and has two children with her partner, the German actor Jonas Laux. She has spoken in interviews about balancing a film career with family life.