Aud Egede-Nissen (May 30, 1893 – November 15, 1974) was a pioneering Norwegian actress, producer, and theater director who became one of the most prominent international figures of the German silent film era. An extraordinary powerhouse of early cinema, she successfully navigated a male-dominated industry as both a leading on-screen star and a studio head.
In 1913, Egede-Nissen made her silent movie debut in Copenhagen with the Dania Biofilm Kompagni film Scenens Børn. Following the advice of Norwegian theatre director Bjørn Bjørnson, she relocated to Berlin in 1914 and quickly appeared in dozens of Danish and German silent films.
At just 24 years old, she established her own production company in Berlin in 1917, the Egede-Nissen Film Compagnie GmbH. She managed its finances and artistic direction alongside her first husband, Georg Alexander. Her studio found immense commercial success by taking advantage of the German import ban on foreign films. Between 1917 and 1919 alone, her company produced at least 29 melodramas and detective serials, often starring Aud and her younger sisters, Ada and Gerd.
Post-WWI economic hardships and the centralization of the German film industry forced her production company to close in the early 1920s.
Egede-Nissen transitioned fully back into acting, working with the most legendary directors of German Expressionism and early cinema, including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch. She played Jane Seymour in Ernst Lubitsch’s Anna Boleyn (1920).She starred as Cara Carozza in Fritz Lang’s masterful crime epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922).She took a major role in F. W. Murnau’s acclaimed drama Phantom (1922).
By the late 1920s, she moved back to Norway. As the era of silent cinema drew to a close, she returned to her roots on the theatrical stage, spending the rest of her career acting and directing in Norwegian theater.
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