Schmidt-Schaller was born in
Magdeburg, the daughter of actors Andreas Schmidt-Schaller and Christine Krüger. She grew up in
Prenzlauer Berg, a borough of
East Berlin. Although she comes from a family of actors, her first experience with acting was during a one-year stay 1997–1998 as an exchange student in
Kansas, where she attended her High School's acting class. Before her movie and TV career, she studied acting at the
Felix Mendelssohn College of Music and Theatre in
Leipzig from 2001 to 2005, and acted at the
Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar from 2003 to 2005. Having played leading roles in several German films, a minor part in
Dark Castle Entertainment's
Unknown (2011) was her first international assignment. After ''
(Nacht vor Augen
, 2008) and Almanya – Welcome to Germany (Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland
, 2011), Unknown
was her third work that was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. For the TV movie Happiness Divided
(Das geteilte Glück'', 2010) she was awarded the German Actors' Award and was nominated for the
German Television Award as best actress. In
Marcus H. Rosenmüller's comedy-drama '''' she starred as Amrita, a member of the
Rajneesh movement caught between the pursuit of self-realization and the love of her children. Almost seven million television viewers tuned in to the ZDF crime drama
Der Tote im Watt in April 2013, starring Petra Schmidt-Schaller as the film daughter of Thomas Thieme.[22] The broadcast ran a few weeks before the premiere of the
Tatort episode
Feuerteufel. There, the actress was seen for the first time as LKA investigator Katharina Lorenz alongside Wotan Wilke Möhring as NDR's
Tatort commissioner Thorsten Falke. According to her own statement, she learned only one day before filming began that it was a new spin-off of Germany's most successful crime series.[23] The films with the investigators are set in changing locations in northern Germany. With the third case
Kaltstart, set in Wilhelmshaven, Falke and Lorenz became the first
Tatort investigators to switch to the Federal Police. After the sixth case
Verbrannt, broadcast in the fall of 2015, Schmidt-Schaller ended her involvement.[24] In 2013, she stood for the large-scale German-Austrian TV production
Der Wagner-Clan. Eine Familiengeschichte as Richard Wagner's daughter Isolde with Iris Berben, Heino Ferch, Lars Eidinger and Eva Löbau. Alongside Jürgen Vogel and Moritz Bleibtreu, she starred in Maximilian Erlenwein's feature thriller
Stereo, which premiered in the Panorama section of the 2014 Berlinale.[25] In 2017, she appeared alongside Jürgen Prochnow in the feature film ''Leander's Last Journey
. This was followed by numerous film - and television films in which Petra Schmidt-Schaller starred: Eine gute Mutter
(2017), Der Mordanschlag
(2018), Wendezeit
(2019), (2021), Over & Out
(2022), Ein Schritt zum Abgrund
(2022) and others. For her role in Marnow Murders'', she received the
German Television Award for Best Leading Actress in 2021. Schmidt-Schaller lives in
Berlin. In August 2011, she gave birth to a daughter. ==Selected filmography==