Birgitte Hjort Sørensen

Birgitte Hjort Sørensen is a Danish actress born on 16 January 1982 in Hillerød, Denmark, where she grew up in the nearby town of Birkerød. Her parents are both doctors, and she has two elder sisters. She attended the Bistrup School in Birkerød and later Øregård Gymnasium in Hellerup, where she served as student council chair and edited the school magazine. A work experience placement at her mother's geriatrics ward led Sørensen to rule out a career in medicine during her early teens. The turning point toward acting came at age 19, during a school trip to London, when she attended the West End production of Chicago. Her interest was further developed through a six-month musical theatre program organized by the Gladsaxe Theatre. She subsequently trained at the Danish National School of Performing Arts.

While still a student at the school, which prohibited outside employment, Sørensen made her acting debut in 2005 by feigning illness to appear as a receptionist in the television series The Eagle. In 2007, she took on the lead role of Roxie Hart in a production of Chicago at the Det Ny Teater in Copenhagen, which became the highest-grossing Danish theatre production of that year and earned her a Reumert prize. She reprised the role the following year in the West End at the Cambridge Theatre.

Sørensen's international breakthrough came in 2010 with the DR political drama Borgen, in which she played television journalist Katrine Fønsmark across the series' original run through 2013, with the character returning in a fourth season on Netflix in 2022. To prepare for the role, she spent a summer training alongside television news teams. Her performance earned her a Robert Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role in Television. She had previously received her first Robert Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role for the 2009 action film Ved verdens ende, in which she played a criminal psychologist's secretary alongside Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. A second Robert Award nomination in the same category followed for her portrayal of painter Marie Krøyer in the 2012 biographical film The Passion of Marie.

Her stage work continued in 2013 when she appeared as Virgilia in a production of Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston at the Donmar Warehouse in London. In 2015, Sørensen appeared in the Game of Thrones episode "Hardhome" on HBO, playing Karsi, a wildling chieftain, and co-starred in Pitch Perfect 2 as Kommissar, the leader of a rival German a cappella group. That same year she received a Bodil Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Someone You Love, in which she portrayed a mother dealing with drug addiction. In 2016, she played Andy Warhol's muse Ingrid in Martin Scorsese's HBO series Vinyl, and later that year made her Broadway debut in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

Sørensen has received a total of three Robert Award nominations and one Bodil Award nomination over the course of her career. She is in a relationship with television writer and producer Kristian Ladegaard Pedersen, whom she met when she auditioned for a role as a television host. They have two daughters together.