Early life Van Aalten was born on August 2, 1910, in
Arnhem in family of a pharmacist. van Aalten found a job with a milliner after school, then trained as a salesgirl at a fashion store in
Amsterdam. She passionately wanted to be a movie actress, but very few films were made in the Netherlands at the time.
Early career with Ufa In 1926, van Aalten entered a beauty competition in a Dutch magazine, which would give her the chance to audition for a part in a real movie in Berlin if she won. Not long after, she was summoned to the German capital for an audition - along with two hundred other girls. Van Aalten had never had an acting lesson in her life, and she was the youngest entrant, so she didn't expect to win, but when the director saw her screen tests, van Aalten's good humor shone through, and she got the job. Van Aalten met the other members of the cast - her six "sisters" (including English actress
Betty Balfour) and
Willy Fritsch as Count Horkay., and she soon fell in love with Fritsch. While van Aalten had a dress made in preparation for the premiere of
A Sister of Six, she was distraught to find that the film had been edited severely to get it to length, and her scenes had been shortened or cut altogether. Despite this, she decided to stay in Berlin and make a career as an actress, and she (unlike a number of her contemporaries) continued to work. Film magazines featured articles about "das Mädchen aus Holland" (that girl from Holland), Another 1930 film in which van Aalten appeared were
Headfirst into Happiness and
Darling of the Gods, which was produced by Ufa's top producer,
Erich Pommer. The film starred
Emil Jannings, the first recipient of the
Academy Award for Best Actor, who'd just completed
The Blue Angel with
Marlene Dietrich. . The New York Times called
Tales from the Vienna Woods "a tasty mélange of comedy and music", and mentioned "the little Dutch actress". Once the war ended, the German film industry that van Aalten had relied on had been completely transformed, and Ufa was gone. Van Aalten tried to find acting work in the Netherlands, then in England, but in the economically depressed atmosphere of post-war Britain, she could not find work as an unknown actress with a foreign accent, and van Aalten never acted again.
Later life In 1954, van Aalten lived in
Voorhout, a town in the western Netherlands, and set up what became a successful business importing and exporting souvenirs and promotional items. In 1972, Dutch TV transmitted a four-part version of "Het meisje met den blauwen Hoed" ("The Girl In The Blue Hat"), an update of van Aalten's 1934 film. She was not mentioned by textbooks on German film like "The BFI Companion to German Cinema", "Das gab's nur einmal" and "The German Cinema Book", but a 1987 book by European culture expert Kathinka Dittrich, "Achter het doek" ("Behind The Screen"), helped bring the story of Dutch movie history of the 1920s and 1930s back to public knowledge. Van Aalten' old age was marred by bouts of mental illness, and she spent her last two years at a psychiatric clinic in the village of
Warmond, where she died on the 27th of June 1999, aged 88. Very few of Truus van Aalten's films have ever been released for home viewing. One possible reason is that the Russian Army seized the Ufa studios in April 1945 and appropriated the contents, including copies of a huge number of German films that have never been seen since. ==Filmography==