Carice van Houten
Carice van Houten
05.09.1976 (48 gadi) (Leiderdorp, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands)
Carice Anouk van Houten (Dutch pronunciation: [kaːˈris aːˈnuk fɑn ˈɦʌutə(n)]; born 5 September 1976) is a Dutch actress and singer. She was born to writer and theatre-radio producer Theodore van Houten in Leiderdorp, Netherlands. Her younger sister Jelka is also an actress. She was exposed to the performing arts at an early age and studied at the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Kleinkunstacademie Theaterschool in Amsterdam. Her first leading role in the television film Suzy Q (1999) won her the Golden Calf for Best Acting in a Television Drama; two years later, she won the Golden Calf for Best Actress for Undercover Kitty (2001). She gained widespread recognition for her performance in Black Book (2006), the most commercially successful Dutch film to date, for which she won her second Golden Calf for Best Actress, in addition to nominations from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the European Film Academy, and the Online Film Critics Society. She was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for Valkyrie (2008), and won her fourth and fifth Golden Calf Awards for Best Actress for The Happy Housewife (2010) and Black Butterflies (2011). Her other notable English-language performances include Repo Men (2010), Black Death (2010), and Brimstone (2016). Since 2012, Van Houten has received international recognition for her role as Melisandre on the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2012–present), for which she has been nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. After meeting Australian actor and musician Guy Pearce on the set of Brimstone in 2015, she gave birth to their first child the following year.