Birth date: July 22, 1974.
Place of Birth: Dülmen, Germany.
Breakout Role: Lola in Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt). The director wrote the role specifically for her.
Urban legend: She was "discovered" as an actress by a casting agent who saw her in a bar restroom one night and asked her to describe herself in one sentence.
Best known to international audiences for her portrayal of the flame-haired, fast running heroine of Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998), Franka Potente is one of Germany's biggest stars. Potente was educated at Munich's Otto Falkenberg Schule and the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York.
She made her film debut in Hans-Christian Schmid's 1996 film Nach Fünf im Urwald, for which she won that year's Bavarian Film Prize for Young Talent; she went on to do of television work before enjoying her international breakthrough in The Princess and the Warrior. The film featured Potente running through time and fate to save her boyfriend from the clutches of his gangster employers.
Potente went on to do starring work in a number of films, including Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior as a nurse in a mental health care facility and in Ted Demme's Blow as Johnny Depp's girlfriend, and in Todd Solandz' Storytelling (2001). Now an international star, she starred opposite Matt Damon in director Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity.
Next up for the actress was a star turn in Oskar Roehler's pyscho-sexual thriller Atomised (Elementarteilchen), reteaming Potente with Moritz Bleibtreu.
Potente has also gone behind the camera. Her directorial debut Digging For Belladonna is a black-and-white, silent production will premiere at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.
