Along with the better-known Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen was a major diva of New German Cinema's most prolific and arguably most important talent, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Tall, slender and seductive, with huge, lovely eyes, Carstensen could crinkle her wide and sensuous mouth into either a delicate sneer or an arc of desperation. She acted in over a dozen Fassbinder films in the 1970s; as with much of his company, she often played people brought down low by social circumstances and their own passions. At other times, though, she played sly and slinky types, sometimes bitchy and
