Marlene Dietrich
German-American actress
original name Marie Magdalene Dietrich, also called Marie Magdalene von
Losch
born December 27, 1901, Schöneberg (now in Berlin), Germany
died May 6, 1992, Paris, France
German American motion-picture actress whose beauty, voice, aura of
sophistication, and languid sensuality made her one of the world’s most
glamorous film stars.
Dietrich’s father, Ludwig Dietrich, a Royal Prussian police officer,
died when she was very young, and her mother remarried a cavalry
officer, Edouard von Losch. Marlene, who as a girl adopted the
compressed form of her first and middle names, studied at a private
school and learned both English and French by age 12. As a teenager she
studied to be a concert violinist, but her initiation into the nightlife
of Weimar Berlin—with its cabarets and notorious demimonde—made the life
of a classical musician unappealing to her. She pretended to have
injured her wrist and was forced to seek other jobs acting and modeling
to help make ends meet.
In 1921 Dietrich enrolled in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsche Theaterschule,
and she eventually joined Reinhardt’s theatre company. In 1923 she
attracted the attention of Rudolf Sieber, a casting director at UFA film
studios, who began casting her in small film roles. She and Sieber
married the following year, and, after the birth of their daughter,
Maria, Dietrich returned to work on the stage and in films. Although
they did not divorce for decades, the couple separated in 1929.
That same year, director Josef von Sternberg first laid eyes on
Dietrich and cast her as Lola-Lola, the sultry and world-weary female
lead in Der blaue Engel (1930; The Blue Angel), Germany’s first talking
film. The film’s success catapulted Dietrich to stardom. Von Sternberg
took her to the United States and signed her with Paramount Pictures.
With von Sternberg’s help, Dietrich began to develop her legend by
cultivating a femme fatale film persona in several von Sternberg
vehicles that followed—Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai
Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The
Devil Is a Woman (1935). She showed a lighter side in Desire (1936),
directed by Frank Borzage, and Destry Rides Again (1939).
During the Third Reich and despite Adolf Hitler’s personal requests,
Dietrich refused to work in Germany, and her films were temporarily
banned there. Renouncing Nazism (“Hitler is an idiot,” she stated in one
wartime interview), Dietrich was branded a traitor in Germany; she was
spat upon by Nazi supporters carrying banners that read “Go home
Marlene” during her visit to Berlin in 1960. (In 2001, on the 100th
anniversary of her birth, the city issued a formal apology for the
incident.) Having become a U.S. citizen in 1937, she made more than 500
personal appearances before Allied troops from 1943 to 1946. She later
said “America took me into her bosom when I no longer had a native
country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German—German in my
soul.”
After the war, Dietrich continued to make successful films, such as A
Foreign Affair (1948), The Monte Carlo Story (1956), Witness for the
Prosecution (1957), Touch of Evil (1958), and Judgment at Nuremberg
(1961). She was also a popular nightclub performer and gave her last
stage performance in 1974. After a period of retirement from the screen,
she appeared in the film Just a Gigolo (1978). The documentary film
Marlene, a review of her life and career, which included a voice-over
interview of the star by Maximilian Schell, was released in 1986. Her
autobiography, Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (“I Am, Thank God, a
Berliner”; Eng. trans. Marlene), was published in 1987. Eight years
after her death, a collection of her film costumes, recordings, written
documents, photographs, and other personal items was put on permanent
display in the Berlin Film Museum (2000).
Dietrich’s persona was carefully crafted, and her films (with few
exceptions) were skillfully executed. Although her vocal range was not
great, her memorable renditions of songs such as Falling in Love Again,
Lili Marleen, La Vie en rose, and Give Me the Man made them classics of
an era. Her many affairs with both men and women were open secrets, but
rather than destroying her career they seemed to enhance it. Her
adoption of trousers and other mannish clothes made her a trendsetter
and helped launch an American fashion style that persisted into the 21st
century. In the words of the critic Kenneth Tynan: “She has sex, but no
particular gender. She has the bearing of a man; the characters she
plays love power and wear trousers. Her masculinity appeals to women and
her sexuality to men.” But her personal magnetism went far beyond her
masterful androgynous image and her glamour; another of her admirers,
the writer Ernest Hemingway, said, “If she had nothing more than her
voice, she could break your heart with it.”
