Melika Foroutan

Melika Foroutan
Foroutan and Ulrich Noethen at the Deutscher Fernsehpreis 2012.
Born	1976 Tehran, Iran
Nationality	German
Education	University of Cologne Berlin University of the Arts
Occupation	Actress

Melika Foroutan (born 1976 in Tehran, Iran) is a German actress.

Melika Foroutan is the daughter of a German mother and an Iranian father, and sister of German social scientist Naika Foroutan. Foroutan's parents met each other in the 1970s in Paris, where her father studied filmography, and her mother worked as an au-pair. Later, they moved to Boppard (am Rhein), where Melika's mother hails from and had two children, the youngest daughter however, Melika, was born in Tehran, where her father hailed from, and where the young family had moved to priorly. While in Iran, her mother worked at Daimler-Benz in Tehran, while her father, who refused to work on propaganda movies for the shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, worked as a football coach, including for half a year as coach of the Iranian national football team. In 1981, following the Iranian Revolution, when Melika was still a child, the family decisively moved to Boppard, Germany.

Melika Foroutan was raised in Boppard. When she was younger, she worked as a waiter in her father's restaurant, as well as in other places. That she wanted to become an actress, she did not know in childhood, although she acted accordingly. At the age of six she was already looking films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and listened to her father's comments from the perspective of a director. With the age of eleven, she then played in a school theater group. She studied philosophy, English, and History from 1995 to 1998 at the University of Cologne, and finished between 1999-2003 a drama studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. In the year of 2003/2004, she was occupied at the city theater of Leipzig.

She is well known, amongst other reasons, for her role in the detective Commissioner playing the role of Sylvia Henke in the crime series KDD - Kriminaldauerdienst, which was awarded in 2007 as the best German series with the German Film Prize. In 2008, she starred alongside Mišel Matičević the lead role in the film adaptation of Frank Schätzing's novel The Dark Side. In the same year of 2008. she starred in Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting. In the two-parter, The man with the bassoon, which tells the story of the family of Udo Jürgens, she played in 2011 the wife of Jürgens' grandfather Heinrich Bockelmann.