  The interest to perform laser spectroscopy in the heaviest elements arises
from the strong impact of relativistic effects, electron correlations and
quantum electrodynamics on their atomic structure. Once this atomic structure
is well understood, laser spectroscopy also provides access to nuclear
properties such as spins, mean square charge radii and electromagnetic moments
in a nuclear-model independent way. This is of particular interest for the
heaviest actinides around $N = 152$, a region of shell stabilized deformed
nuclei. The experimental progress of laser spectroscopy in this region
benefitted from continuous methodological and technical developments such as
the introduction of buffer-gas-stopping techniques that enabled the access to
ever more exotic nuclei far-off stability. The key challenges faced in this
endeavor are small yields, nuclides with rather short half-lives and the need
to search for atomic transitions in a wide spectral range guided by theoretical
predictions. This paper describes the basics of the most common experimental
methods and discusses selected recent results on the atomic and nuclear
properties of the actinides up to nobelium where pioneering experiments were
performed at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum f\"ur Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt,
Germany.
