Quick Facts
Biography
Dennenesch Zoudé (born 14 December 1966) is a German actress. Zoudé is principally employed in television. She has been married since October 2009 to Italian film director Carlo Rola and lives in Berlin and Monte Carlo.
Life
Dennenesch Zoudé was born in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. The daughter of an Ethiopian roadwork engineer, Zoudé has lived in Berlin since the age of 2. Even as a girl in kindergarten, she was interested in nothing else than the stage. Her parents did not believe that acting is a sensible profession. So after her final secondary school examinations, they pushed their daughter to attend the university. The Berlin native looked for the shortest course of study that she can find and initially trained to be a bilingual business correspondent. However, she never lost sight of her dream job, acting.
Work
Zoudé trained to be an actress at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York City. In addition to this, she took singing lessons with Cullen Maiden and Veronika Fischer. Dennenesch Zoudè gained her first acting experience in a play in 1986 in a principal role with her theater debut in Lysistrata. She acted in the Hemingway piece The Fifth Column at the Ernst Deutsch Theater. In 2002 and 2003 she was the love interest in the Berlin Everyman Festival in Jedermann by Brigitte Grothum.
She is known today from numerous TV and cinema productions:
- Established as the first dark-skinned TV detective in the German TV series Polizeiruf 110.
- The series Gegen den Wind (Against the Wind) provided her breakthrough in Germany.
- Her later films, 2008 and 2009, are Meine Heimat Afrika (Africa, My Homeland) and Vergiss nie, dass ich dich liebe (Never forget that I love you).
Social involvement
Zoudé is involved in the rights of the black population in Germany and in Africa; at the same time, she is the special ambassador for the United Buddy Bears.