Theatre maker and actress Annemarie Prins died

Annemarie Prins died on 13 January 2026, at home in Amsterdam, at the age of 93. From the early 1960s, she was an idiosyncratic and innovative voice in Dutch theatre as a director. The general public knew her mainly as an actress in TV series. She played Aunt Maud in Old Money, the old Annie in Annie M.G. and Ms Slothouwer in The secret diary of Hendrik Groen. But she could also be seen on stage until recently. As recently as 2024, she toured the country with her enthusiastically received solo performance About the mountains. ‘My last one,’ she knew.

Prins graduated from the Arnhem School of Drama in 1961, but quit as an actress after only a few years. Because of stage fright, but also dissatisfaction with the productions she acted in, she became a director. That profession, for which there was no training yet, she learned at the Leiden student theatre and in Poland, where there was a livelier, more political theatre culture. Once back, she founded her own group in 1965, Theater Terzijde, the first political theatre company in the Netherlands, where, besides actors, she brought in visual artists and musicians. She was looking for a way of working that could create a different relationship between makers among themselves and between makers and spectators. She wanted to create pieces that questioned social reality without sacrificing poetry. Even then, she was well aware of her own privileged position and, in that light, asked herself from what perspective a story should be told.

The opening performance A Lorca case is not known to us dealt with the murder of poet Federico García Lorca at the beginning of the Spanish civil war. A reviewer who questioned whether it was the role of theatre to ‘enlighten the spectator about the world in which he lives’, as Theatre Terzijde set out to do, had to give in to the ‘exquisite moments of drama’ and ‘all the youthful freshness and ingenuity’ of the direction.

In the late 1960s, Prins broadened her scope to radio, television and opera. For DNO, she made Monkey defeats the Knekelgeest (1980) and Houdini (1981) by Peter Schat. She also directed high-profile plays with the Groningen amateur company Waark. The eponymous first play made it to the Holland Festival production, despite its amateur status. Meanwhile, as a single mother, she raised two children.

In 1985, she was at the cradle of a theatre group again. Together with Edwin de Vries and Henk van der Meulen, she founded De Salon. Here, she broke new ground with a trilogy based on the work of Samuel Beckett. Especially working with his prose led to a different approach to text than before, in which musicality weighed as much as the meaning of the words. When she started playing herself again in the mid-1990s, she worked on this in unforgettable autobiographical (semi)monologues: Harmony Court, Peckish waltz, Old and White, Death and so on and finally About the mountains. In the process, language remained a great love. She learned her texts with great precision and perseverance, ‘so that I can juggle with them’. At her last performance, she started rehearsals months before they started, for fear of not getting the text in her head.

Over the years, as a teacher and through the amateur performances she made, Annemarie Prins helped countless creators and players along the way. ‘That one still started with me,’ she often said when a younger colleague came up.

At the intersection between directing and teaching, her work also took place in Cambodia, where she stayed regularly between 2005 and 2012. With Cambodian actresses, she made two performances and a radio play about their experiences during the bloody Khmer Rouge dictatorship. One of those performances also travelled to Rwanda, where the processing of the violent past had already taken further shape. Rwandan actors complemented the cast. The shared trauma of genocide proved able to bridge cultural differences. The questions these projects raised for Prins about her own neocolonial position underpinned the performance Old and White (2015).

Prince hated sentimentality, especially her own. She was radical, always looking for the core. Radically looking for what theatre was all about for her. Radically honest, for instance in her feedback to actors and students. Radically shameless when a role called for it. She saw through the impact of her old, bare body in the shower, a cigarette within reach, in Annie M.G. and pushed aside all vanity to do so. This unabashedness, in addition to her professionalism, made her a much sought-after actress into old age.

She could also be radically impossible, for herself and others. Some relationships in work and private life never worked out, while others became more established. Those who took her to heart cherished her obstinacy, her sagacity, her often black humour and, finally, her sweet side, which gained more space as the years progressed.

Annemarie Prins died at her own request after her health deteriorated rapidly in a short period of time. The farewell will take place in a small circle.