Melika Foroutan is the daughter of a German mother and an Iranian father and sister of German social scientistNaika Foroutan. Foroutan's parents met in the 1970s in Paris, where her father studied filmography and her mother worked as an au-pair. Later they moved to Boppard, where Melika's mother hails from and had two children, their youngest daughter however, Melika, was born in Tehran, where her father hailed from, and where the young family had moved to priorly. While in Iran her mother worked at Daimler-Benz in Tehran, while her father, who refused to work on propaganda movies for the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, worked as a football coach, including for half a year as coach of the Iranian national football team. In 1981, following the Iranian Revolution, when Melika was still a child, the family decisively moved to Boppard, Germany. Melika Foroutan was raised in Boppard. When she was younger, she worked as a waiter in her father's restaurant, as well as in other places. That she wanted to become an actress, she did not know in childhood, although she acted accordingly. At the age of eleven she then played in a school theater group. She studied philosophy, English, and History from 1995 to 1998 at the University of Cologne, and finished between 1999-2003 a drama studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. In the year of 2003/2004 she was occupied at the city theater of Leipzig. She appears as a highly attractive and talented reincarnation of Silvana Mangano differing with an increased and rarely encountered state of livelyness. Her role as the detective Commissioner playing the role of Sylvia Henke in the crime series KDD – Kriminaldauerdienst, was awarded with the German Film Prize as the best German series in 2007 in spite of an eye make-up uncommon for the job in hand. In 2008 she starred alongside Mišel Matičević the lead role in the film adaptation of Frank Schätzing's novel The Dark Side. During the same year she starred in Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting. In the 2011 two-parter The man with the bassoon, which tells the story of Udo Jürgens' family, she played the wife of Jürgens' grandfather Heinrich Bockelmann. Melika Foroutan is married and currently lives in Berlin.
