Julie Engelbrecht

Immediately after receiving her high school diploma in France at age 18, Julie Engelbrecht was selected from among 1250 applicants at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, where she studied for four years. She experienced Chekov, Brecht, and Comedia del Arte (among others), as well as clown workshops, fencing, classic and modern dance, boxing, theater sciences, diction, and singing.

During her early years at primary school in Paris, Julie attended concerts, theater, cinema, and dance. At the Circus School Fratellini, she learned acrobatics, juggling, and how to ride a unicycle.

At 12, she auditioned for a TV lead and shot her first movie: Adieu mon Ami. This experience fueled her desire to become an actress. She enjoyed putting her own imagination, fantasy, and dreams into a character, and discovered how acting could enrich her own personality, and to help her to bring more experience to future roles.

She also learned how to play piano, and she sang the part of one of the three boys in Mozart´s "Magic Flute" at the Opera Festival Gut Immling when she was 13.

Julie was born in 1984 in Paris. Her father is a French actor, author and director. Her mother was Constanze Engelbrecht, a famous German actress, pianist and singer who, unfortunately, died in 2000 when Julie was 16. Thanks to her parents, Julie is bilingual: she speaks both French and German fluently.

Julie inherited her love of and dedication to music from her very talented mother and considers music as integral to her artistic expression as acting is. By the age of 14, her family moved to an old water mill in the countryside near Paris, where she rode in her free time and took part in show jumping contests for fun.

During acting school holidays, she was already acting in several feature films such as Napola and The Red Baron, as well as in TV movies like the German criminal series Tatort and the postwar family drama Mutig in die neuen Zeiten, for which she was nominated for the Undine Award as Best Newcomer.

In 2011, she was nominated for the Bernd Burgemeister Prize for her performance in the TV movie Die Tänzerin.

More recently Julie played a CIA Agent in the German/Austrian Feature Die Mamba. She has also appeared in Les vacances du petit Nicolas and Barbecue. Additionally, Engelbrecht shot an episode of FX's The Strain that will air on Sept 20th.

She has got a chance to play very different characters in her movies: pop star, dancer, high jump Champion at the Berlin Olympics 1936, murderer, and romantic parts. In 2012, she played the female lead, 'Olga', a Russian car dealer in the international feature Forty-five Minutes to Ramallah, shot in English. It won both the Golden Biber and Audience Biber and is nominated in the WildCard category for the German Film Awards. She shot the feature film Frei, in which she played the lead, a Jewish pianist who survives the holocaust. The film premiered at the Bolzano Film Festival and the Incredible Film Festival Potsdam and was awarded the Student Biber.

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