Fien de la Mar

Biography

Dutch actress, revue star and diva; daughter of the actors Nap de la Mar and Clasina Klopper.

De la Mar left the Rotterdam girls' HBS shortly before her final exams and was on stage from that moment on. Not much later she was with Louis Davids in the revue 'Had je me maar'. In the late 1920s, she joined the Rotterdamsch Hofstad Tooneel, which played at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague, conducted by Cor van der Lugt Melsert.

From 1934, De la Mar starred in a number of sound films. As an experienced singer, she was cast in the Jordaan films De Jantjes and Bleeke Bet; in Het leven is niet zoo kwaad and Op stap she even more or less played herself. Yet she herself felt that sound film had come a few years too late for her: her first film roles came in her mid-thirties. Her eighth film, Ergens in Nederland, was her last. The war proved to be too much of an interruption to her film career for De la Mar – as for many other actors.

De la Mar - who did not register with the Cultuurkamer during the German occupation of the Netherlands - married architect Piet Grossouw in 1941. After the liberation, they opened the De la Mar Theater in Amsterdam's Marnixstraat near Leidseplein: she had success there in cabarets and as an actress. However, the theater was not a financial success and was taken over in 1952 by Wim Sonneveld, who renamed it the Nieuwe de la Mar Theater.

De la Mar, who had always been a capricious and volatile personality and who could be very difficult for her co-stars, became increasingly unstable after the death of her husband. She died in 1965 after a suicide attempt.