Johanna ter Steege's debut is a performance built to be missed. She is in the opening of The Vanishing and then she is not, and the film needs us to feel that for the rest of its length. We did.
Fi1m perspective
Saskia Wagter goes into a motorway service station for drinks and does not come out. That is Johanna ter Steege's first film role, and most of what she has to do in it is be there briefly enough, and warmly enough, that the rest of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988) plays as her absence rather than as a puzzle. Sluizer has already shown us the man who takes her, so we are not waiting to find out what happened. We are waiting, with Rex Hofman, for her to walk back into the frame. We kept waiting long after the film had made it plain she would not, and that is the performance doing its job: a holiday, a car, a woman we liked for a quarter of an hour, and then a shop door she does not come back through.
The debut took her abroad. Robert Altman cast her as Jo Bonger in Vincent & Theo (1990); István Szabó used her twice, in Meeting Venus (1991) and then as the lead, Emma, in Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe (1992); there was Immortal Beloved (1994) and Bruce Beresford's wartime ensemble Paradise Road (1997), where she played Sister Wilhelmina. It is the sort of run that usually points somewhere, and it is fair to say it did not lead where a debut like that seemed to promise. We have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to judge them here. What they share is a director with a point of view and a part that asks for quiet rather than volume.
Quiet is what she does. The roles that keep coming to her are women dealing with loss or with a relationship coming apart, played close and small, and she is at her best when the film is confined and talky and there is nowhere for an actor to hide. Last Conversation (2009) puts her alone on screen for a single-take phone call as Anna, which is about as exposed as the medium gets. She has said, of herself, "Acteren en verlegen zijn gaan prima samen": acting and being shy get along fine. Watching her, that sounds less like a paradox than a method.
Since then she has mostly worked at home, in Dutch films and on stage. She was the mother in Cool Kids Don't Cry (2012), played Gedda in The Marriage Escape (2020), a comedy largely spoken in the Twents dialect of the region she comes from, and has made site-specific theatre in Twente, having co-founded a company, De Trust, while still training in Arnhem. It is not the career the service station scene seemed to announce. It is a smaller and, by the look of it, a chosen one.
If you know her from nothing else, see The Vanishing, and do not read about it first.
Biography
Johanna ter Steege is a Dutch actress. She was born on 10 May 1961 in Wierden, Overijssel. From 1979 to 1984 she studied at the academy of dramatic art in Kampen, and from 1984 to 1988 she attended the acting school in Arnhem.
She made her film debut in George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988) as Saskia Wagter, for which she received the European Film Award for Best Supporting Actress. Subsequent roles include Jo Bonger in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo (1990), Johanna Reiss in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved (1994), and Sister Wilhelminia in Bruce Beresford’s Paradise Road (1997). She has also appeared in films by István Szabó and others, and worked extensively in theatre.
