Helga Liné is a German-born Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

-Spanish film actress and circus

Circus

A circus is commonly a travelling company of performers that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and other stunt-oriented artists...

 acrobat

Acrobatics

Acrobatics is the performance of extraordinary feats of balance, agility and motor coordination. It can be found in many of the performing arts, as well as many sports...

 best known for her work in the horror

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

 genre of film. She made 132 appearances mostly in film between 1941 and 2006, but most of her work has been in Spanish cinema.

Biography

Helga Line was born as Helga Lina Stern on July 14, 1932, in Berlin, Germany. At a young age her family fled Germany during the Nazi regime and took refuge in Portugal. At the age of just 9 years old she made her first film appearance there in the film Porto de Abrigo. Helga began her career as a dancer and acrobat in circus performances in Portugal throughout the 1940s and later became a model.

In the 1950s she made further appearances in film, but her career took off after she moved to Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

 in 1960. From this point, the red-headed actress made many appearances in the 1960s, particularly in horror films, action or spy thrillers, and westerns. She also starred in Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon

Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon

Ercole contro i tiranni di Babilonia is a 1964 film directed by Domenico Paolella and starring Peter Lupus.- Plot :...

, which was filmed in 1964. Although she appeared in James Bond

James Bond

James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

 spoof films such as Agent 077 - Mission Bloody Mary

Agent 077 - Mission Bloody Mary

Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary or Agente 077: Missione Bloody Mary is a 1965 Italian action spy adventure film. The first of the Secret Agent 077 film series directed by Sergio Grieco.-Cast:*Ken Clark... Dick Malloy...

(1965) alongside Ken Clark, she is well noted for her horror film work in particular, starring as the spy Natasha in the Gothic feature Horror Express

Horror Express

Horror Express, also known as Pánico en el Transiberiano/Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express, is a 1972 Spanish horror film directed by Eugenio Martin, produced by Bernard Gordon written by Arnaud d'Usseau and Julian Zimet , and starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas.The film is...

, in the title role in The Lorelei's Grasp, as a predatory vampire countess in the erotic film The Vampires' Night Orgy, and as the leader of a Satanic cult in the Black Candles. She starred alongside Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy

Paul Naschy

Paul Naschy was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—the wolfman, the hunchback, Count Dracula, the mummy—have earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney...

 in two notable films: Horror Rises from the Tomb

Horror rises from the tomb

Horror Rises from the Tomb , is a 1972 Spanish horror film starring Jacinto Molina and was directed by Carlos Aured. It was followed by a sequel, Panic Beats. The film introduced Naschy's character of Alaric de Marnac, an executed warlock who returns to life centuries later to wreak his revenge...

and The Mummy's Revenge.

Later she would go on to work under Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular...

 in films such as Labyrinth of Passion

Labyrinth of Passion

Labyrinth of Passion is a 1982 Spanish screwball comedy written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Starring Cecilia Roth, Imanol Arias and Antonio Banderas. The plot follows a nymphomaniac pop star who falls in love with a gay Middle-Eastern prince. Their unlikely destiny is to find one another,...

in 1982 and Law of Desire in 1986. She also took part in the popular Spanish TV series Verano azul

Verano azul

Verano azul was a famous Spanish television show directed by Antonio Mercero that first aired in 1981. It tells of the adventures of a group of youngsters between ages 9 and 17, while on summer vacation in Nerja, a small town on the Mediterranean Costa del Sol, Andalusia, in Southern Spain...

in the early eighties, as a secondary character.

External links and sources