Melinda Kinnaman

Melinda Rosalie Kinnaman (born 9 November 1971) is a Swedish-American actress.

Early life

Kinnaman is a dual citizen of Sweden and the United States. Kinnaman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to American parents Dee and Steve Kinnaman. Her father, originally David Kinnaman, is an American who was drafted during the Vietnam War and deserted the military from his base in Bangkok.

Her paternal half-brother Joel Kinnaman is also an actor.

Career

By age thirteen, she made her acting debut, portraying the tomboy Saga in the acclaimed 1985 movie My Life as a Dog, directed by Lasse Hallström, for which she won Best Young Actress in A Foreign Film at the 9th Youth in Film Awards. She was educated at the Swedish National Academy of Mime and Acting in Stockholm from 1991 to 1994. Since then she has been part of the ensemble at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and had major parts in many classics, such as Iphigenia in Iphigenia at Aulis (1995), Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (1997), Anja in The Cherry Orchard (1997), Estelle in Sartre's No Exit (2000), Marie in Woyzeck (2003), Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (2004) and Martirio in The House of Bernarda Alba (2008). In 2011, she played the violinist in Duet for One.

She has also developed acrobatics skills and worked with theatre interwoven with contemporary circus at the Royal Dramatic Theatre with Robert Lepage's magical production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play and advanced even more in the lead of a brave acrobatic staging of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (2002).

She followed up on that for a few years guest performing in Copenhagen in Shakespeare's The Tempest and HC Andersen's The Little Mermaid. She has participated in productions of modern dance in Stockholm.