Carice van Houten is a person.
Carice van Houten . Born in Leiderdorp , a town in the western Netherlands , she was brought up by writer and theatre-radio producer Theodore van Houten . She gained widespread recognition for her performance in Black Book ( 2006 ) , the most commercially successful Dutch film to date , for which she won her second Golden Calf for Best Actress , in addition to nominations from the Chicago Film Critics Association , the European Film Academy , and the Online Film Critics Society . Since 2012 , Van Houten has received international recognition for her role as Melisandre on the HBO fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones ( 2012 -- present ) , for which she has been nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series . After meeting Australian actor and musician Guy Pearce on the set of Brimstone in 2015 , she gave birth to their first child the following year .