Halina Reijn

A native of Amsterdam, born in 1975, versatile actress Halina Reijn attended the Maastrict Theatre Academy in the Netherlands, and broke through to substantial acclaim courtesy of Job Gosschalk, a casting director who witnessed her in a play and introduced her to Dutch theatrical impresario Theu Boermans. Subsequent years found Reijn honing her craft on the stage (initially under the tutelage of Boermans), in productions such as Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (as Nina) and Hamlet (as Ophelia). She moved into television in the early 1990s, and entered film around the tail end of that decade; early features that starred Reijn were predominantly Dutch outings with exposure confined to western Europe, though she scored a major international success as the second female lead (after Carice van Houten) in Paul Verhoeven's World War II thriller Zwartboek (2006), and in 2008 joined Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh and others as Margarethe van Oven in United Artists' Hitler assassination drama Valkyrie.

~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide