Maria Simon (born February 6, 1976) is a German actress.
Simon's German father originally hailed from Leipzig and studied mathematics in Leningrad.
There he met Simon's Russian-Jewish mother, Olga, who studied electronics and originally hailed from Kazakhstan.
The couple married while studying.
Maria Simon is the younger sister of actress Susanna Simon, who was born on 23 July 1968, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Maria was born and brought up in the former East Germany, but moved to New York City in 1990 to live with her father, a computer expert with the United Nations, and her sister Dalena Simon.
She also has a sister named Alyssa.
Simon has four children, the first from a former relationship with the actor Devid Striesow, and three with her ex-husband, the actor Bernd Michael Lade.
After finishing school she moved back to the newly reunited Germany to study acting at the Academy of Performing Arts Ernst Busch in Berlin where she received her diploma in 1999.
She won the award for Best Actress for her role in the film Zornige Küsse at the 22nd Moscow International Film Festival in 2000.
Simon was nominated as the best supporting actress in the 2003 German Film Awards, and was named European Shooting Star (i.
e.
, best newcomer) at the 2004 Berlinale.
In the same year she played Polly in Bertolt Brechts Dreigroschenoper at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.
Her TV movie Kleine Schwester was nominated for the Adolf Grimme Awards in 2005.
In the near future: Europe is in chaos. Right-wing extremists have taken power in many countries. The democratic state that once was Germany has become a totalitarian system that persecutes dissenters, Muslims and homosexuals. Jan Schneider has stood as a lawyer on the side of dispossessed victims. When he learns that the regime wants to jail him again, he decides to flee with his family. His goal is the South African Union, which enjoys political and economic stability after an economic boom. A freighter is to bring him, his wife Sarah and the two children Nora and Nick together with other refugees to Cape Town, but the tugs abandon their passengers in much too small boats off the coast of Namibia. On rough seas, it comes to disaster, the little Nick is lost, and no one knows if he could reach the shore...
Kingdom of Hungary, 17th century. As she gets older, powerful Countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614), blinded by the passion that she feels for a younger man, succumbs to the mad delusion that blood will keep her young and beautiful forever.
Based on the childhood memories of actor Michael Degen, the movie deals with the everyday struggle to survive as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. As his father had died in 1940 after being released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Michael and his mother fear to be deported themselves. They manage to live in Berlin with false names and faked papers, hidden by several, often broken, people...