Trivia

She passionately wanted to be a movie actress, but very few films were made in the Netherlands at the time.

After World War II Truus tried to find acting work in the Netherlands, then in England, but in the depressed atmosphere of post-war Britain, nobody was interested in an unknown actress with a foreign accent. Perhaps her lack of English was one reason she hadn't tried to get to Hollywood, where so many of her contemporaries had found work. Truus van A1alten never acted again.

Very few of Truus van Aalten's films have ever been released for home viewing. One possible reason is that the Russian Army seized the Ufa studios in April 1945 and appropriated the contents - including copies of a huge number of German films that have never been seen since.

1954 found Truus Van Aalten in Voorhout, a town in the western Netherlands, setting up what was to become a successful business importing and exporting souvenirs and promotional items.

In the autumn of 1940, Truus returned to live in the Netherlands now under German occupation. She found herself being offered film work - to appear in Dutch films controlled and censored by the occupying power. She refused, realizing that they only wanted to use her for propaganda - but as she turned the repeated requests down, she knew she was destroying any hope of rekindling her movie career.

Truus found a job with a milliner after school, then trained as a salesgirl at a fashion store in Amsterdam.

In 1926, when she was just sixteen, she won a competition and found herself acting in a movie in Berlin. Studio bosses soon realized that she was a gifted comedienne, and she went on to act in many feature films.