Paula Beer

Early life

Paula Beer grew up in Mainz as an only child.^[2]  At the age of eight, she took part in a theatre course which, according to her own account, instilled in her a love of acting: "I was very afraid of it, but once on stage, I felt a sense of fulfillment," said Beer. After her family moved to Berlin in 2007, she attended a Montessori school. From the age of twelve, she gained further acting and dance experience with the youth ensemble of Berlin's Friedrichstadt-Palast theatre, where she was a member for four years.  In 2013, she graduated from high school^[3] and moved to Paris.

Career

She first became known as a teenager for her main role in Chris Kraus' 2010 film Poll. In 2015, Beer made her television debut alongside Sven Gielnik and Joachim Król in Kai Wessel's Pampa Blues. That same year, Beer, along with Jella Haase, Jannis Niewöhner , and Moritz Leu , portrayed four teenagers in Theresa von Eltz 's 4 Kings , who voluntarily spend Christmas in a psychiatric hospital. Critics praised the performances of the four young actors  and 4 Kings won the Bronze German Film Award in the Best Feature Film category. In the summer of 2015, Beer attended an acting course at the Drama Summer School of London 's Guildhall School of Music and Drama.^[4]

Her breakthrough came in 2016, when she starred in François Ozon's Frantz, for which she won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Performer at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival. In the melodrama, shot largely in black and white, Beer played the fiancée of a German soldier killed on the French front in World War I, who meets a mysterious French ex-soldier (played by Pierre Niney) in Quedlinburg in 1919. After being cast in Frantz, Beer had six weeks to learn the role of Anna in both German and French. During filming, Beer and her co-star Niney helped each other with any language difficulties. Ozon remarked that Beer, who switches back and forth between German and French in the film, possessed a mischievous and deeply melancholic quality. He praised her acting range, credibility, and photogenic qualities: “She was only twenty years old, but her performance showed great maturity. She could embody both the innocence of a girl and the strength of a woman,” Ozon said of Beer.  The film drew comparisons to the young Romy Schneider , and after filming Frantz, Beer spent a month in Marseille to further improve her French.

In 2018, Beer starred in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Never Look Away, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.

In the following years she became internationally known for her performances in Christian Petzold's films, starting with Transit (2018). For 2020's Undine Beer won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival,^[5] alongside the European Film Award for Best Actress. She also starred 2023's Afire, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival. In 2025, she again worked with Petzold in Miroirs No. 3 which premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight section.