Ode to Fien de la Mar | Infant phenomenon

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It is only two storeys high. There is now, on the ground floor, a jeans shop, the shop calls their jeans Luxury Denim. I can imagine expats living there now; a couple with a child, an expensive pram, tax breaks.
 

Those old films, those old records, they don't reflect it. Then you miss 'charisma', and she possessed that in a big way.
 

She was a child star, was also called Fientje. Fientje de la Mar, the infant phenomenon! She didn't finish high school. There was no need for that. 'When it was towards spring, I said to myself, "What do you care anyway?"'' Three months before her final exams, she dropped out.
 

Was there ever a little girl more gifted than Fientje?
 

Her grandfather, Charles de la Mar, was obsessed with Napoleon, so her father's name was Napoleon. Nap in Amsterdam style. She herself was named after Josephine de Beauharnais, Emperor Napoleon's great love; a woman who never smiled with her mouth open because her teeth were rotten from the sugar beet juice she drank as a child.
 

Somewhere there is a metaphor hidden here - about wealth and an excess of sweets, and how they cause spoilage at a young age.
 

Eighteen years old and no one has ever addressed her angrily or punitively.
 

Her parents were both actors, Nap and Sien. So were her grandparents, Charles and Rika. She inherited the talent, was seen as the great promise, WAS a great promise - and perhaps it was fulfilled. But she was born into a family of fate. A nepo baby from a cursed family.
 

The thing about drama is that it all happens in the here and now. Meanwhile: then and there. Some film footage has survived, but it's still not the same.
 

Nap was a unique guy, but always besotted.
 

Her mother died after falling down the stairs. Rolled down four flights of stairs! In a heavily inebriated state. The stage career of her father, Nap de la Mar (an incredibly funny little man) came to an early end when he fell through a glass roof, unable to move his arm as a result.
 

Fien was also unable to move her arm at one point, after her first attempt.
 

Nap was admitted to a clinic with delirium tremens at the end of his life. Died when he was fifty-two.
 

Fientje drank cognac from teacups.
 

Those hypothetical expats probably don't know the history of their appartement. Sometimes there is a sign next to a door, 'here lived Willem Frederik Hermans', or something like that, but there is no sign in Beethovenstraat. None: 'This is where Fien de la Mar jumped out the window.'
 

If you said, 'Fien, how beautiful that was,' she didn't know at all.
 

The theatre on Marnixstraat was named after her, the theatre her husband built especially for her, the theatre they would run together. The theatre that almost immediately went bankrupt. She had talent, but not for business. It has been in operation for years now, you can go see Jesus Christ Superstar and Hadewych Minis there.
 

There was a greatness at work there.

It would be nice if this were a story of a woman who worked for the emancipation of other women, who paved the way for other female actors, who pursued gender equality. But this is not that. She wanted to be the ONE woman. Tolerated no competition.
 

That's when I witnessed Fien and Minny really grabbing each other's hair - that's when I saw for the first time that people can pull tufts of hair out of each other's heads.
 

Now she would probably be diagnosed with one or the other. Back then, that didn't happen.
 

Once, when I had to accompany Fien, I looked into her eyes. I kind of looked into someone else's hell - and then she was singing a beautiful French song. And I was so horrified. I thought, "ho ho, never look again."
 

In a mini-documentary on YouTube, theatre producer Wim Ibo says: "Fien de la Mar was a bitch of a person. She was also, according to those interviewed,
 

a phenomenon
 

genius
 

a hereditarily burdened woman
 

an awesome living personality
 

the most alive human being
 

My little son was five at the time. I brought him along and knocked at her dressing room and she shouted, 'Come on in!' There sits Fien, stark naked in front of the mirror.
 

I say: 'Fien, I brought my little son, if you could just put on a peignoirt...'.
 

'I wouldn't dream of it!' she says.
 

'Well,' I say, 'then it won't happen. Come with me again, Jaap.'
 

The interior of her flat: black-lacquered doors, lots of red, dark, sensual. There was a scent of heavy perfume. There was a grand piano, but her red-painted nails were too long to play it.
 

The fictional expats' house: oak herringbone floor, glass doors with black steel frames, grey corner sofa, pastel colours in the children's room. Everything else beige. A kitchen island.
 

Towards the end of her life, she became paranoid, thought she was being chased, called her friends, her acquaintances incessantly at night. Everyone conspired against me. Her GP sent a letter to the PTT asking them to cut off her phone connection.
 

That woman was undoubtedly one of the most talented actresses we ever had. But such a curiously undisciplined creature.
 

Two high is not high enough. She was in the Wilhelmina Gasthuis for another five days before she died.
 

I know of no other Dutch actress who so unfailingly certainly knows how to move completely from within with the most natural means as Fientje de la Mar.
 

On my birth card, my name is also Fientje. Now I am only called Fientje by the ING app, where I have had an account since time immemorial, and where I can't manage to change the settings. ('Fientje, is it time to think about a mortgage?')
 

My mother gave me the name Fien, after Fien de la Mar: an alcoholic who jumped out the window in Beethoven Street, a phenomenon, a hereditarily burdened woman, a genius, a curiously undisciplined creature, an infant phenomenon, the most alive human being.
 

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The quotes in italics are from Jenny Pisuisse's work, Fien de la Mar: Portret van een kunstenaar. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1982.