Marina Gera

Marina Gera is an Emmy Award-winning actress. She was born in the city of Szeged in Hungary, and is the first Hungarian actor to win an International Emmy Award. By the time she was two years old, she had already decided that she wanted to be an actress and she stepped on stage for the first time at the age of five. She graduated in acting in 2008 from the prestigious University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. After university, she joined a newly founded Hungarian theatre company, which had a focus on international co-productions. Marina has worked extensively in Budapest, Parma, Moscow, and Graz as well as performing widely across Europe. Since her primary interest has always been film, she developed her theatre and film career in parallel from the start. She has worked with the multiple Cannes award winner Kornél Mundruczó, starred in György Pálfi's Free Fall (Szabadesés, 2014), which received several awards at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and appeared in the Hungarian original hit series from HBO Europe, Easy Living (Aranyélet, 2016), that has also been screened in the US. Although she has appeared in several films and television series, her lead role as Irén in Örök tél (Eternal Winter) in 2018 was a breakthrough role for her, having been cast by the director Attila Szász in 2017. The role involved special preparation, with Marina reducing her weight to 46 kilograms before shooting. For her performance, she received awards for best actress at three international festivals (Tiburon International Film Festival (California, USA),Festival de Cinema Avanca (Portugal), Kyiv International Film Festival Kinolitopys (Ukraine)), and she won the Emmy for Best Performance by an Actress at the end of 2019. It was her first lead role in a tv movie, the first Hungarian Emmy nomination and she is the first ever Hungarian to win an International Emmy. Since Eternal Winter has screened, there has been increasing international interest in Marina. She has worked with English film director Peter Strickland, and is working former BBC commissioner Adam Kemp at Aenon Ltd, to develop film ideas with Marina in mind. She is also working on writing her own original screenplay, about the dramatic coming-of-age story of an Eastern European actress. In her home country, she recently starred in the television film Nino bárkája, directed by Bence Miklauzic, which was released in December 2019, with Marina portraying a woman suffering from Tourette syndrome.