Sensualist, The

Brazen adaptation of Jan Wolkers's novel won an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-language Film Production and marked the breakthrough of director Paul Verhoeven in Hollywood. The film tells of an artist (played by Rutger Hauer) having an impassioned romance with a young woman (a role played by the twenty-year-old acting school student Monique van de Ven) who later dies from a brain tumour. Verhoeven's Turks Fruit is one of the most successful Dutch movies of all times (3.5 million visitors). During the 1999 Netherlands Film Festival Verhoeven received a Golden Calf for Best Dutch Film of the Century for Turks Fruit. In 2007 the film was also admitted to the "Canon van de Nederlandse Film", a list of the most important Dutch films. (Nederlands Film Festival)