Few characters in romantic comedies are as loathed as Mia. She has little more than a few minutes of screen time in seminal Christmas weepy Love Actually, but boy does she make an impression. After flirting with her boss, Harry, played by Alan Rickman, the pair embark on an off-screen dalliance that leads him to devastate his loyal wife. Few scenes are more certain to make you blub than the one in which Emma Thompson weeps to the refrains of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. But it's not Joni's fault Emma Thompson is sad. It's Harry's. And Mia's.
Thank God it's only fiction. But the sight of Mia, in her little devil horns, is enough to make the stomachs of married women everywhere clench with anxiety. Does the actress who plays her sit on the train and feel an icy star descend on her from the mother of two across the aisle?
Heike Makatsch is the actress in question. Born in Germany in 1971, she has enjoyed an interesting and varied career. The role of the dastardly Mia is, of course, the role for which she is best known, but she has worked steadily in film and has been seen in films like The Book Thief and Resident Evil. In the latter, she plays a mole working for the Umbrella Corporation who suffers the consequences of being in their underground facility when a certain deadly pathogen turns everyone into zombies. Not the biggest role, but that's Hollywood. In recent years, she has starred in The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and Geography Of The Heart, and was nominated for an International Emmy for her performance in biopic Margarete Steiff: A Story of Courage. She also found success as a singer and broadcaster.
More recently, in April Heike participated in an all-star video which saw German celebrities satirise the government's lockdown restrictions. Heike's contribution was a sketch in which she refused to answer her own front door, despite the doorbell ringing, for fear of letting the virus in. After the campaign became popular among COVID conspiracy theorists, other public figures called the series cynical and potentially dangerous. As a result, Heike and others requested that their clips be expunged from the series, and she distanced herself from the incident via an Instagram post.
Heike was in love, actually, with a British A Lister back in the day. She dated Daniel Craig for seven years, with the relationship ending in 2004. He went onto become a global star by playing James Bond, and is now married to Rachel Weisz.
Heike lives in Berlin, and has three daughters. Is she plagued by the ghost of a woman she played almost twenty years ago? Is she sick of pointing out that it takes two to tango? That the onus to cheat is on the married party, not the single woman? Who knows. But she can rest assured that she has made a real impact in film through her divisive performance.
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