Actress says dad tried to abuse her

Berlin - Actress Nastassja Kinski on Sunday accused her father, late German film icon Klaus, of attempting to abuse her, following allegations by her half-sister Pola that he raped her throughout her childhood.

Nastassja Kinski, 51, who achieved Hollywood fame with films such as Cat People and Tess, told the Bild am Sonntag weekly that her father did not actually rape her but that "he tried to."

"He always touched me far too much, held me so tightly against him that I thought I could not escape. At the time I was four or five years old and we were living in Munich," Kinski recounted.

"Instinctively I recognised that this could not be the loving embrace of a father but that it was more than that," she added.

The accusations against Klaus Kinski, a volatile film star who died in 1991, came after Pola Kinski's allegations that he began abusing her at the age of five and raped her for the first time when she was nine.

Violent father

The assaults continued until she was 19, she alleged in an interview with Stern magazine ahead of the publication of her memoirs.

In the 1970s, Nastassja Kinski made headlines for her affair with Tess director Roman Polanski. She was 15 at the time, while he was 42.

Born in Berlin but living in California, she is the daughter of Klaus Kinski's second wife Brigitte. Pola Kinski's mother was his first wife, singer Gislinde Kuehbeck. They also have a 36-year-old half-brother, Nikolai.

Nastassja Kinski painted a picture of a violent and cold father who would fly into fits of rage.

"He was a tyrant. I can scarcely remember us all sitting around a table together," she told Bild am Sonntag.

If he were still alive today, "I would do everything to ensure he went to prison," she said.

"When he died, some people told me they were sorry. I wasn't sorry."