Marlene Dietrich German Actress Born 1901 in Rote Insel

Early life

Marlene Dietrich was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on 27 December 1901 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. Her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant who died in 1916 during the First World War, and her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine, came from a Berlin family that ran a jewellery and clockmaking business. At about the age of eleven she merged her first two names into "Marlene".

Dietrich attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls' School and then the Victoria-Luise-Schule, now the Goethe-Gymnasium, graduating in 1918. She studied the violin and hoped to become a concert player, but a wrist injury ended that plan. She auditioned for Max Reinhardt's drama academy without success, yet soon found work in his theatres as a chorus performer and in small roles.

Career

Her film debut was a minor part in The Little Napoleon (1923). Through the 1920s she worked on stage and in film in Berlin and Vienna, drawing most attention in musicals and revues, and by the end of the decade she had larger film parts such as Café Elektric (1927).

Her breakthrough was the role of the cabaret singer Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930). The film introduced her signature song "Falling in Love Again". On the strength of its success she moved to the United States under contract to Paramount Pictures, and made six films there with von Sternberg between 1930 and 1935: Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman. Morocco brought her only Academy Award nomination.

After the partnership ended she made Desire (1936), The Garden of Allah (1936), her first colour film, and Knight Without Armour (1937) in Britain. Box office returns declined, and in 1938 American exhibitors included her on a list of stars described as "box office poison". She applied for American citizenship in 1937 and became a citizen in 1939. Her career recovered with the western comedy Destry Rides Again (1939), in which she introduced "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have".

During the Second World War Dietrich was among the first public figures to sell war bonds, touring the United States from January 1942 to September 1943. In 1944 and 1945 she took part in two long USO tours, performing for Allied troops in North Africa and Europe and travelling into Germany with American generals. In the late 1930s she had helped set up a fund to assist people leaving Germany, and she put her entire salary for Knight Without Armour into escrow for refugees.

Her later films include A Foreign Affair (1948), Stage Fright (1950), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s she worked almost entirely as a live performer. A 1953 engagement at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas led to a run at the Café de Paris in London in 1954. From the mid-1950s Burt Bacharach was her arranger, and they recorded four albums and several singles between 1957 and 1964. She toured West Germany in 1960, where the reception was divided, and Israel. She appeared on Broadway in 1967 and 1968 and received a Special Tony Award in 1968.

Her stage career effectively ended in September 1975, when she fell during a performance in Sydney. Her last screen appearance was in Just a Gigolo (1978), in which she sang the title song. She then lived in her Paris apartment, where she wrote her memoir Nehmt nur mein Leben, published in 1979. Maximilian Schell's documentary Marlene (1984), built from recorded conversations with her, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Recognition

Dietrich received the American Medal of Freedom in 1947 for entertaining troops overseas. France made her a Chevalier and later a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and she also held the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Belgium's Order of Leopold and a French National Order of Merit knighthood. In 1965 she became the first woman and the first German to receive the Israeli Medallion of Valor. Other recognition includes a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a German Film Honorary Award in 1980 and a CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986. Berlin made her an honorary citizen in 2002.

Personal life

Dietrich married the assistant director Rudolf Sieber on 17 May 1923, and the marriage lasted until his death in 1976. Their daughter, Maria Riva, was born in Berlin on 13 December 1924 and became an actress who worked mainly in television. Dietrich died in Paris on 6 May 1992. Following a funeral at La Madeleine, she was buried in Berlin, close to her mother's grave in Schöneberg.