Love Actually star is unbelievably hard to recognise 20 years after playing disliked temptress Mia

20 years ago the movie Love Actually was released and it was packed full of all sorts of festive love stories, some of which haven't aged particularly well at all.

However, nestled in and among these tales of new couples finding love there was the story of Harry (Alan Rickman) and Karen (Emma Thompson), a married couple with two children.

Also her brother is the prime minister because in this movie everyone is basically connected to everyone else in a weird and convoluted way.

Only Harry's getting awfully close with his secretary Mia (Heike Makatsch) and she asks him for a Christmas present, while they get very close at the office Christmas party.

Karen eventually catches on that Harry's bought a very fancy gold necklace for that special someone for Christmas, and when she opens her present from her husband... it's a Joni Mitchell CD.

Universal

Crushed by the realisation that he's bought a gift for another woman, Karen confronts her husband and he admits what he'd been doing.

While they stay together, the movie's epilogue set at Heathrow Airport shows Karen as distant towards Harry, indicating that some irreparable damage may have been done to their marriage.

Yep, that's Love Actually for you, though plenty reckon Karen ought to have kicked Harry out after realising he bought another woman a fancy necklace and got her a Joni Mitchell CD, for many that would have been the final straw.

While Mia was one of the movie's villains, though arguably Harry was much worse for going along with her, these days she looks rather different from the role she played in the 2003 movie.

The Love Actually character had a recognisable brunette bob, whereas these days off set Makatsch is a blonde with longer locks.

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Viewers may also have seen Makatsch in 2005's A Sound of Thunder and 2013's The Book Thief, with her also appearing in a number of German-language films.

Some of the stars of Love Actually look basically identical to the way they did 20 years ago.

However, the material hasn't always aged that well in everyone's eyes, with director Richard Curtis once admitting that he'd come to see people's point on some of the scenes.

He said that he was once asked about 'the stalker scene' where Andrew Lincoln's Mark shows up to profess his love to Keira Knightley's Juliet.

Being confused as to which scene they were talking about, Curtis then said he was 'educated in it' and came to realise some of the possible implications of the scene.