German-born Franco-Romanian actress, composer, singer and dancer Rona Hartner was born in Bucharest on March 9, 1973. Attracted to the world of show business as a child by family parties, she studied music (saxophone, guitar, piano) and dance, then drama at the University of Bucharest in 1996. That same year, the actress, who had already appeared in several roles, successfully auditioned for Tony Gatlif's film Gadjo dilo, which revealed her to the public. Performing the song "Disparaîtra " on the film's soundtrack, Rona Hartner was awarded the Best Actress prize and the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival (1997), the Best Actress prize at the Brussels Film Festival (1998) and the Prix Michel-Simon (1999), in addition to being nominated for the César for Best Emerging Actress. After another collaboration with the director in Je suis né d'une cigogne (1998), Rona Hartner appeared in a number of films, including Granier-Deferre's Les Grands enfants (1998), Jean-François Stévenin's Mischka (2000), James Ivory's Le Divorce (2002), Michael Haneke's Le Temps du loup (2002), Didier Bourdon and Yves Fajnberg's Madame Irma (2006), Xavier Deluc's Tombé d'une étoile (2007) and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Poulet aux prunces (2011). At the same time, she pursued a singing career, collaborating with David Lynch on "More Than That " (1999) and others with Alif Tree, Gomez & Dubois, then Shantel and DJ Click in a style blending Eastern European music with electronic sounds on the albums Boum Ba Clash (2005) with the latter, followed by Nationalité Vagabonde (2008) and Natura (2011), Gypsy Therapy (2013) and Sell Fish (2018) with DJ Tagada, The Balkanik Gospel with the Zuralia Orchestra (2015) and Electro Sky Gospel (2021). In 2023, a final film role in Alexandre Arcady's Le Petit Blond de la Casbah preceded his death from lung and brain cancer on November 23, 2023 in Toulon, at the age of 50.
