Juliane & Maria

Maria Schrader knew her way around a movie set, but Juliane Köhler was a screen ingenue when they were paired as wartime lovers in Aimée & Jaguar. Schrader had starred in a dozen films, including Doris Dörrie's Nobody Loves Me, which played American arthouses in 1994. She'd even had a hand in several screenplays, which she wrote with former boyfriend Dani Levy, an actor and director himself. But Köhler's experience was on stage and TV when she got the career-changing call: the chance to play Lilly Wust, a Nazi army officer's wife and mother of four children who risked it all for the love of Felice Schragenheim, a Jew in hiding.

Köhler believes that director Max Färberböck made shrewd use of her relative awkwardness. "Because I was inexperienced in film, the director understood that a little bit. Lilly Wust is always moving fast, with her back to the camera. I'm not really playing to the camera."

Even by transatlantic telephone wire, the actress's English is excellent, thanks in part to two years studying with Uta Hagen at the famed HB Studio in New York. The no-nonsense Hagen taught her not to sweat the details: "Just prepare, then do it," the teacher would say. The advice came in handy during the film's big love scene, which both actresses describe as having been no big deal to play.

More nerve-racking was the day Lilly Wust herself visited the set, a sumptuous evocation of 1940s Berlin. By then in her mid 80s, she gave the actress a thumbs-up on her costumes and styling. But Köhler chose not to ask about her life or her feelings for Felice. "I wanted to create the role without her."

Schrader had no such choice, though she could draw on Felice's passionate writings and the photos that Lilly still held close. "Felice was already a very experienced survivor when our film starts," the actress says. "She was so hungry for life, she took every responsibility so seriously." Capturing that energy was the appeal -- and the challenge. "There's a certain amount of adrenaline a body can produce," Schrader says. "Otherwise, we drop dead, probably."

If Köhler is suitably tentative and torn in Aimée & Jaguar, Schrader is audacious and tensely sexy. The pair shared the Best Actress Silver Bear at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, and the rich roles -- "the greatest gift for an actress," Schrader says -- have boosted their careers. Köhler will soon begin shooting a big-budget German drama about a Jewish couple who fled Nazi Germany for Africa. Schrader met with an American agent during a recent promotional visit to New York.

Meanwhile, audiences continue to respond fervently to Aimée & Jaguar. Köhler says that after the movie was released in Germany, she got 10 letters a day from closeted young lesbians looking for a piece of the strength that Lilly showed in professing her sexuality to her husband. Some even waited at the stage door when Köhler returned to do theater.

In a small way, the actress knows the feeling. She was in the Los Angeles auditorium last year when the movie was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Film. It lost, but Köhler had the chance to meet Meryl Streep, her acting idol, and sing her praises. Streep laughed appreciatively. "And after one minute," Köhler says, "she was gone."
-- Scott Heller

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