Actress Vicky Krieps to Receive KVIFF President's Award

At the opening ceremony of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the KVIFF President’s Award will be presented to actress Vicky Krieps, winner of a European Film Award for Best Actress for the biopic Corsage, a performance for which she was similarly recognized at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section.

One of today’s exceptional acting talents, Vicky Krieps was born in Luxembourg, where her grandfather Robert Krieps was a well-known politician and member of the country’s resistance movement during the Second World War.

Krieps first gained experience as an actress while at the Lycée de Garçons secondary school in Luxembourg City, after which she attended the Luxembourg Conservatory. As late as in 2004, however, she was still not sure whether her future lay in acting. Instead, she worked for a social project at a primary school in a South African township near the town of Knysny. When she eventually decided to study acting, she attended the Zurich University of the Arts while simultaneously gaining hands-on experience at the Schauspielhaus Zürich.

International renown came in 2017, when she appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic drama Phantom Thread. The following year, she had a role in the cinematic adaptation of David Lagercrantz’s successful novel The Girl in the Spider’s Web (dir. Fede Álvarez). In 2021, Krieps had several interesting acting opportunities: her performance in French director Mathieu Almaric’s Hold Me Tight was nominated for a César, she played the main role in M. Night Shyamalan’s mystery-thriller Old, and she appeared in another leading role, this time alongside Tim Roth, in the drama Bergman Island (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve). Also that year, she had a cameo in Daniel Brühl’s Next Door (2021), which was shown at last year’s festival in Karlovy Vary.

A role as the rebellious Empress Sisi in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (2022) brought her several awards including the Best Actress Award in Un Certain Regard and Best Actress at the European Film Awards. She again donned a period costume for both parts of a celebrated adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (2023, dir. Martin Bourboulon). Karlovy Vary audiences could see her at last year’s festival as the free-thinking Vivienne in Viggo Mortensen’s western drama The Dead Don’t Hurt (2023). She also played the title character of director Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert (2023), which was shown at the Berlinale.

This year’s Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival included Love Me Tender (2025; dir. Anna Cazenave Cambet), based on the book and story of Constance Debré. Krieps portrays Clémence, a former lawyer who navigates a custody battle over her son after coming out as a lesbian. Later this year she is set to appear alongside Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver as part of an all-star cast in Jim Jarmusch’s latest outing, Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.

On the occasion of honoring Vicky Krieps with its President’s Award, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will be showing the film Love Me Tender.