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Ayelet Zurer

Ayelet Zurer is an Israeli actress whose work crosses film, television and the stage, with a career that has moved between Israeli productions and major international releases. Born in Tel Aviv on June 28, 1969, she began building her screen career in the early 1990s as a series regular on the teen drama Inyan Shel Zman. She later played Shira Steinberg in Florentine from 1997 to 2000; in a 2000 episode, Shira and Ronit Elkabetz’s Nicole shared the first lesbian kiss shown on Israeli television. Zurer’s title role in Nina’s Tragedies brought her an Israeli Academy Award for Best Actress in 2003. Television proved just as important to her career. She starred in Betipul in 2005 and received a Best Actress award from the Israeli Television Academy; the series was later remade by HBO as In Treatment. Her film roles reveal a performer at home in very different kinds of stories. In Steven Spielberg’s Munich, she played the wife of Avner Kaufman. She followed that with appearances in Fugitive Pieces, Vantage Point and Adam Resurrected, then took on the role of scientist Vittoria Vetra in Angels & Demons. In Man of Steel, she played Lara Lor-Van, Superman’s mother, while Ben-Hur added another large-scale production to her filmography. Zurer has continued to find substantial television roles on both Israeli and international screens. She played Elisheva Rotstein in Shtisel and Vanessa Marianna-Fisk in Marvel’s Daredevil, returning for the show’s third season and again in Daredevil: Born Again. She also starred in the psychological thriller Losing Alice and appeared in the third season of You. Across intimate dramas, thrillers, comic-book adaptations and historical spectacle, Zurer’s career is marked by a willingness to shift scale and genre without losing sight of character.