Marco van Basten is one of the most prominent and loved Dutch players of all times. This phenomenal Dutch striker was ranked eighth in the election for Football Player of the Century, organized by the France Football magazine. The living legend started his fabulous career at the age of seven, when he joined the club EDO from his hometown Utrecht. The next year Marco moved to UVV Utrecht, where he spent his childhood. In 1982 the young talent was noticed by the greatest Dutch club Ajax Amsterdam and moved there. During the next five years van Basten won everything possible on the local stage and logically he was transferred to the leading club in Europe at that time AC Milan. With the Italian side he won the most valuable club trophy, the European Cup, twice in 1989 and 1990, as well as a number of trophies in Italy. Meanwhile, Marco van Basten achieved his greatest success winning the European Championship in 1988 with the Dutch national team. The fine striker scored 218 goals in 280 games for Ajax and AC Milan and made 58 appearances for the national team of his country, scoring 24 times. During his remarkable career van Basten was awarded multiple individual prizes, including World Player of the Year and European Footballer of the Year. In 1992 the genial striker retired from football due to bad injuries and is currently coach of the Dutch national football team.

Ruud Gullit, together with Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard, formed the world-known Dutch trio that was part of the strong Dutch national team and the then best European club AC Milan in the 1980s and early 1990s. During his career Gullit has changed his clubs quite often. He first started playing football at the age of eight with the Meerboys club. Later he passed through the junior stages of Amsterdam Old West and DWK to sign his first professional contract with Haarlem in 1979. The other clubs that Gullit represented and where he showed his talent were Feyenoord, PSV Eindhoven, AC Milan, Sampdoria and Chelsea. Having won almost all possible club trophies in Europe, Gullit put an end to his active career in 1998 after 454 club appearances and 175 goals scored. The highlight of Gullit’s career was the European title with the Dutch national team from the 1988 European Championship in Germany. After his retirement, Ruud Gullit took up managerial activity and up to now has coached the teams of Chelsea, Newcastle United, Feyenoord and Los Angeles Galaxy.

Fanny Blankers-Koen was a legendary Dutch athlete who remains in the history of world sports above all with her four Olympic titles from the 1948 Summer Olympic Games in London. Her extraordinary career lasted from 1935 to 1955, during which time she set a huge number of records in a variety of athletic disciplines, such as sprint, long jump, high jump, hurdling events and pentathlon. The highlight of her career were the 1948 Olympics, where she won the 100m, 200m, 80m hurdles and 4x100 relay, making one of the most remarkable achievements in athletics of all times. In addition to this astonishing feat, the great athlete won five European and 58 Dutch titles in many different disciplines. In 1999 Fanny Blankers-Koen was declared Female Athlete of the Century by IAAF due to her immense importance for the development of athletics. After a long bout of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Blankers-Koen died in 2004 at the age of 85 in Hoofddorp.

Pieter van den Hoogenband is one of the most prominent and successful contemporary swimmers in the world. He is the current world record holder in the most attractive discipline - 100m freestyle swimming. The young Pieter achieved his first significant success in 1993 at the European Youth Olympic Days. He made his breakthrough on the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, narrowly missing the medals in both 100m and 200m freestyle. In 1999 he won an amazing six gold medals on the European Championship in Istanbul and became one of the best swimmers worldwide. This was confirmed a year later, when he became two-time Olympic champion in Sydney. On the Athens 2004 Olympic Games van den Hoogenband won the title in 100m freestyle once again, along with two silver medals in 200m freestyle and the 4x100m relay. The Dutch swimmer has received multiple individual awards, including World Swimmer of the Year in 2000 and three times Dutch Sportsman of the Year.

Rintje Ritsma belongs to the most gifted speed skaters of our time and is at the same time one of the brightest Dutch sport stars. The Bear from Lemmer, as they call him, boasts a row of excellent achievements, the only missing trophy on his wall being an Olympic title. He participated in three Winter Olympic Games in 1994, 1998 and 2006 and won two silver and four bronze medals, but never managed to take the Olympic gold. His rich collection of prizes includes four World Championship and six European Championship allrounder titles; an unsurpassed achievement. During his active career Rintje Ritsma set four world records in different disciplines. For a total of 1,125 days Ritsma stayed at the top of the all-time world ranking.

I really like documentaries, therefore reality is important to me when I do fiction. It’s often related to my own life, my Dutch background. The art scene in Holland has always attempted to be realistic. The Dutch painters of 400 years ago were meticulously realistic.

Although van Gogh's artwork was unappreciated during his lifetime (he only sold a single painting), today he’s one of the most highly regarded of all painters. Before he began applying brushstrokes of vibrant colours to his canvases, he attempted to present the life of the impoverished (e.g. 'The Potato-Eaters'). In 1888, when van Gogh relocated to the south of France, he found himself impressed by the yellows and reds of the Mediterranean and started utilizing them symbolically to represent his frame of mind (e.g. 'Sunflowers'). He painted such famous pieces as 'Starry Night' and 'Bedroom at Arles'. The artist's tragic life, whose ups and downs he described in a sequence of letters to his brother, ended in suicide.

Like no other painter before or since, Rembrandt played with dark and light in his paintings, always finding a good balance between the two. An extremely prolific artist, he left a legacy of some 600 paintings, 2,000 drawings and 300 etchings, and is justly reputed as one of the greatest painters of the 17th Century. He was the most gifted etcher of all time to boot. Rembrandt chose biblical scenes, landscapes and animals as the subjects of his paintings, but also painted nearly a hundred self-portraits as well as the portraits of members of his close family. Included among his best works are the huge and spirited 'The Night Watch' (1642), 'Syndics of the Drapers' Guild' (1662), 'Portrait of a Man in a Tall Hat' (1662) and 'The Jewish Bride' (1664).

Also known as Benedictus de Spinoza, he was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam to a family of converts and nevertheless received an Orthodox Jewish upbringing from his father, who was a merchant and importer. Baruch didn't want to follow in those footsteps, devoting himself to two passions – philosophy and optics. He began working as a lens grinder in order to support himself. Excommunicated from the Jewish community, he probably lived and worked in the school of Franciscus van den Enden, his former Latin teacher. Around 1661, Spinoza moved from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg (near Leiden), and later lived in Voorburg, finally settling in The Hague. His writings include 'A Short Treatise on God', 'Man and His Well-Being' (1662),' A Treatise on the Improvement of Understanding' (1662) and 'Philosophical Principles of Rene Descartes' (1663). Towards the end of his life, he worked on his major philosophical work, 'Ethics', which could only be published posthumously. Spinoza supported relativism, and as a rationalist he preceded the philosophy of Enlightenment. His T'heologico-Political Treatise' (1670) made him infamous with the government and religious authorities. As a wholly rationalistic philosopher, a pantheist and moral relativist, he established the Spinozistic or Naturalistic School of Philosophy. He died from lung illness, caused by glass dust. Interestingly, before the Euro was introduced in the contemporary Netherlands, Spinoza's portrait was on the Dutch 1,000-guilder banknote.