Sibel Kekilli

Kekilli was born and raised in Heilbronn, to a family of Turkish origin. Her parents came to Germany from Turkey in 1977, and were described by Kekilli as having a rather modern and open attitude. After completing school with excellent grades at age 16, she entered a 30-month-long combined training program to become a certified public administration specialist at the local city administration.

After successful completion of the training program, she continued to work as an administrative assistant for another two years at Heilbronn city hall, then moved to Essen, where she worked various jobs as a bouncer, cleaner, waitress, nightclub manager, saleswoman, and pornographic film actress.In 2001–2002, over a period of six months, Kekilli appeared in a number of pornographic films for various directors including Josef Baumberger and Harry S. Morgan.

In 2002, while at a shopping mall in Cologne, she was noticed by a casting director, who invited her to audition for a role in a film. She won the leading part in Head-On (German: Gegen die Wand) against a field of 350 other hopefuls. The film was released in 2004 and was a major success, receiving several prizes at film festivals. Filming proved strenuous for Kekilli personally, and she underwent an appendectomy during filming in Turkey.

Shortly after the release of Head-On, the German tabloid newspaper Bild made public Kekilli's earlier work in pornography. This led to a public sensation, and Kekilli's parents broke off all contact with her. She received the 2004 Bambi prize for "best shooting star" for her role in Head-On. During the televised acceptance speech, she tearfully complained that she was being subject to a "dreckige Hetzkampagne" ("dirty smear campaign") and "Medienvergewaltigung" ("media rape"). Bild-Zeitung was later reprimanded by the Deutscher Presserat (German Press Council) for the manner in which it covered the story.

Kekilli starred in the Turkish coup d'état film Home Coming (Eve Dönüş) (2006), playing the wife of a man who was unjustly imprisoned and tortured. The performance won her the Best Actress award at the 2006 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival. Also that year, she played a Jewish woman on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the 2006 film The Last Train (German: Der letzte Zug). In 2009, she played Umay, a young Turkish woman who leaves Istanbul to return to her family in Berlin, in When We Leave (Die Fremde). She was awarded the Lola for Best Actress in 2010 for her role. In 2010, Kekilli was cast as Shae in HBO's Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

In 2011, one year after first appearing in a supporting role in the long-running crime series Tatort, she became a permanent cast member as new investigator Sarah Brandt, working alongside chief investigator Klaus Borowski. She said that she was glad not to be playing a character of foreign descent, as she feels she has been typecast in the past. In 2017 she left the Tatort franchise, after 14 feature-length episodes, citing a need for change.