The Spanish cinema of the 90s earned a bad reputation (somewhat deserved), but he left marvels such as ‘Thesis’, ‘All about my mother’, ‘The day of the beast’, ‘Family’ or ‘The language of butterflies’ to remember. Only in that world of directors who jumped from short to feature, firecrackers from Albacete and Menkes and the Miró law at its peak can one understand the rise, climax and immediate fall of an actress who with just one word it stayed in the collective subconscious: Silke. We haven’t heard from her for a long time. And is that… What happened to Silke?
arrival at the cinema
Silke Stoves Klein never expected to become a movie starLet alone end up attending the Goya Awards as a brand new nominee. Born on February 6, 1974 (which means she’s on the verge of 50 right now) in Madrid, the daughter of a lawyer and a German translator, she lived her life like anyone else: she went to high school, finished her studies, and At the age of 18, he accidentally got a small role in a Manuel Iborra film: ‘Virginia Club Orchestra’.
Silke left her studies, went to see the world, started a local craft business and, like someone who doesn’t want the thing, she went from hanging around the trendy neighborhoods of Madrid to starring in ‘Hello, are you alone?’ together with Candela Peña. The boom was immediate, and everyone wanted to meet this new face of Spanish stardom before, like all stars, it went out.
In just two years she went from being unknown to being nominated for a Goya for Best New Actress for ‘Tierra’. As she herself declared to El País Semanal, he was in the most confusing time of his life. He got into three characters in six months and it wore him down emotionally. Reading her statements at that time is seeing a person who was in a whirlwind from which she desperately wanted to get out: “My family found me stressed, hysterical, very bad: I was depressed and clueless”, came to comment. Only two things could happen: a fall into the void or a full stop.
success and fall
In both 2000 and 2001, he premiered four films, appeared in commercials for sanitary napkins… It was the kindest face in the world of Spanish cinema, modernity made person. And little by little she learned to reconcile fame with her life, without knowing that in the retrospective of her career (of five years) she herself had hit the nail on the head: “Everyone was determined to create a myth, a kind of wonderful womanwhen I am a very simple person”, he commented.
However, all that comes goes. The quality of his tapes went upside down and the premiere of the laughable ‘Tuno negro’ marked an almost defining separation with her life. But for Silke, losing popularity was only a blessing. She herself said over and over again that no matter how much the press insisted on considering her a symbol of the new national cinema, His entire career was based on a coincidence.
His roles were getting smaller. In the Mexican ‘Al otro lado’ she was just a cameo, and, already more interested in other things, in 2007 he said goodbye with ‘La hora fría’, which went unnoticed on the billboard. Since then, silence. Silke was and was not, she passed through the Spanish celluloid as an illusion, a muse she refused to be. And since then, what happened to her?
A literally hidden gem
It was El País that located it ten years later, in 2016: was in Ibiza, selling her pieces of artisan jewelry in Las Dalias, the most famous market in the city. Withdrawn from the cinema and appearing only in a couple of very small and very specific productions, no release date or any kind of distribution: ‘Bluu, the last days of Ibiza’ and ‘4 altars’, a Peruvian film that was left halfway due to the pandemic and resumed it in 2021.
Silke is married, has a son and has stopped looking to see if she is recognized on the street. She has changed her brand name from BySilke to Silke K Horn and instead of clinging to fame, she has decided to dedicate herself body and soul to what makes her happy. She is not doing badly: she has international orders, she has opened her own workshop leaving the Las Dalias market and she can finally be honest about her time when she was everything. When asked about the whirlwind of those movies, she confesses that “They took my innocence”.
Gone are the times of ‘Atómica’, ‘Km. 0’ or ‘Clams and mussels’, and not even the best script in the world would make him give up his dream. Because, as she herself says, the only thing left of that commercial for pads are the wings. And no one can cut them.