Shades of stardom

Sandra Hüller is in two riveting films this awards season, the moral thriller Anatomy of a Fall and the Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. The German actor isn't after the spotlight-but she may not have a choice

- By David Canfield. Photographs by Emma Summerton

THE LAUDED GERMAN comedy Toni Erdmann features Sandra Hüller singing what has to be the most triumphantly awkward performance of “Greatest Love of All” in cinematic history. Hüller’s Ines, a closed-off corporate consultant living in Bucharest, spends nearly three hours onscreen enduring the outrageous pranks of her estranged father as he reenters her life to lighten her up and strengthen their bond. His climactic stunt—fooling Ines into taking on an American classic at a Romanian stranger’s Easter party—risks her total humiliation. Stiff in a white buttondown and black blazer, trying to bury her thick German accent, she stumbles into the song while her father, donning a ridiculous wig and false teeth, plays piano beside her. A few minutes in, she’s all but screaming the lyrics. This emotional crescendo, so fully earned in Hüller’s bracing turn, marks the moment that a generational talent revealed herself.

Hüller was in her late 30s then, with more than a decade of film credits behind her. Still, Toni Erdmann brought her to the US for the first time ever, thanks to a successful push for a best international film Oscar nomination. Fans here had no idea who she was and treated her like a discovery. It all seemed to promise a bright, glitzy future as a movie star. “But nothing happened after,” Hüller says now from her home in Germany, not a shred of disappointment in her voice. “It can just be over in a minute, and that’s okay.”