Carice van Houten acts with her face before the line arrives, and the face is usually deciding something unpleasant. Black Book remains the fullest account of what she can do; her English-language work since has asked for less of it.
Fi1m perspective
The scene in Black Book (2006) we keep coming back to is a woman at a basin. Rachel Stein is bleaching her hair to become Ellis de Vries, and Paul Verhoeven lets Carice van Houten play it as a chore rather than a transformation. There is no speech and there are no tears, just a face working out how far this will have to go, and then going there. It is the plainest statement of her method we know: the decision shows before the words, and often there are no words.
She has said she was brought up on silent films and thinks she "even learned to act without speaking", and Black Book is built on that. She is in nearly every scene, lying to a man's face, singing for people who would shoot her, and the film is a record of what staying alive costs her. We found the basin harder to watch than any of the shootings, because she plays it as housework and Verhoeven does not cut away. We scored the film 80 and would not move it. The last hour explains too much; she never does.
She was already a star at home before Verhoeven found her, from the television film Suzy Q (1999) and the family film Miss Minoes (2001), and the Dutch work has a lightness her international parts seldom ask for. After Black Book came Valkyrie (2008), opposite Tom Cruise for Bryan Singer, and then the long run as Melisandre in Game of Thrones (2012–2019), which made her known to people who had never seen a Dutch film. We have not reviewed the programme, so we will say only that an enigmatic supporting part spread across several seasons is a different job from a lead carried alone, and that her English-language films since have mostly wanted the sombre half of her and left the rest.
The Dutch directors seem to know where the rest is. The Happy Housewife (2010) and Black Butterflies (2011), in which she plays the poet Ingrid Jonker, both came after the international attention and both were made at home. Martin Koolhoven has directed her three times. Halina Reijn gave her the lead in her first feature, Instinct (2019), and the two went on to make Red Light (2019–2021) together. By her own account she is better at fears and doubts than at confidence, and the pattern of the career suggests the big English-language parts keep asking for the confidence.
If you know her only from television, start with Black Book. It is the one film in which somebody gave her the whole job, and it is the standard the rest of her work, reviewed or not, has to be held to.
Biography
Carice Anouk van Houten is a Dutch actress. She was born on 5 September 1976 in Leiderdorp, Netherlands.
She trained at the Kleinkunstacademie in Amsterdam after a brief period at the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts. Van Houten first gained attention for leading roles in the television film Suzy Q (1999) and the feature Miss Minoes (2001), both of which earned her Golden Calf awards. She received further recognition for her performance as Rachel Stein in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006), winning another Golden Calf. Internationally, she is known for portraying Melisandre in the television series Game of Thrones (2012–2019) and for roles in films including Valkyrie (2008) and Brimstone (2016). Her sister Jelka van Houten is also an actress.
