Ursina Lardi

Saturday 14 June, 12:00 noon
Ca’ Giustinian, Venice

La Biennale di Venezia will present the Silver Lion to the Swiss actress Ursina Lardi.

“Radicalness and empathy”: these are the words with which Willem Dafoe described the career of Ursina Lardi, the recipient of the Silver Lion.

“An actress of consistently intense depth, ready to take risks and embrace directorial approaches based on different perspectives – reads the motivation – Ursina Lardi is defining her own creativity as an actress in increasingly authorial terms. In all the characters she has played – from Einar Schleef’s Salomé to Fassbinder’s Maria Braun, from Ljuba in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, to many others – Ursina Lardi has had the infinite grace and painful insight to infuse great humanity into every line, every nuance of the texts, both classical and contemporary. Her stage presence gives her body the power to become not only an absolute theatrical mechanism, but also testimony and perhaps even a challenge, the ultimate political body. In her collaboration with the director Milo Rau in particular, Ursina Lardi has made her own individual story a collective one, taking upon herself, lucidly and with dignity, the contradictions of the bourgeois and capitalist West, almost as if the actress were, again and always, an incarnation of her own time. In the tenderness of a smile or the bitter terror of a glance, Ursina Lardi embodies the thousand nuances of an era on the brink of desperate collapse and at the same time reveals the possibility of a resistance that is not only artistic, but political and human as well. For this reason, and for the commitment with which she will undoubtedly take on times to come, turning theatre into the critical mirror of civilisation, Ursina Lardi is the recipient of the Silver Lion of Biennale Teatro 2025”.

Ursina Lardi will appear on stage at the 53rd International Theatre Festival on Thursday June 12^th for the Italian premiere of The Seer, that she wrote together with Milo Rau (repeat performance on Friday June 13^th).

Ursina Lardi (Samedan, Switzerland 1970) is an actor in theatre, film and television. At the age of 22, she moved to Berlin and enrolled in the Ernst Busch acting school. Since 2012, she has been a member of the company of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, where she has worked with Thomas Ostermeier, Katie Mitchell, Luk Perceval, Alvis Hermanis, Romeo Castellucci and Milo Rau, with whom she shares the creative and interpretative processes for four extraordinary productions: Compassion. The history of the machine gun; Lenin; Everywoman; and their newest play, The Seer, which premiered in Vienna and Venice in June 2025. Her longstanding and fruitful artistic partnership with independent director and playwright Thorsten Lensing has seen her in many of his productions, including The Cherry Orchard, The Brothers Karamasov, Infinite Jest and Crazy for Comfort. Her roles in film and TV are also numerous, including The White Ribbon (directed by Michael Haneke, Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2009); Lore (directed by Cate Shortland, Lola in Bronze 2012) and The Nameless Day (directed by Volker Schlöndorff, 2017), which earned her numerous awards, including the Eliette von Karajan Cultural Fund Award 2006, the Swiss Film Award 2014 (Best actress), and the Hans Reinhart Ring 2017, Switzerland's highest award for theatre professionals.