Marlene Dietrich

Actress

  • Born: December 27, 1901
  • Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
  • Died: May 6, 1992
  • Place of death: Paris, France

German-born American actor

Dietrich established herself worldwide in an acting career that began in the infancy of the film industry, largely on the strength of her image as the modern femme fatale, a woman who was glamorous, self-confident, erotic, and independent.

Area of achievement Film

Early Life

In 1907, when her father suddenly died from a heart attack after being thrown from a horse, Marlene Dietrich (mahr-LAY-nah DEE-trihk) was enrolled in the Auguste-Victoria School for Girls in the Nürnbergstrasse, Berlin. There she remained for the next dozen years while her widowed mother remarried (to Eduard von Losch, a colonel in the Royal Grenadiers) and Germany’s Wilhelmian capital moved ever closer to the Great War. For Leni (as Dietrich was known then) and her older sister Leisel (Elisabeth), it was a time of rigorous but not unpleasant routine, a time to take music lessons, to learn French and English, and to practice the deportment expected of an officer’s daughter in a bustling city envied by much of Europe for its prosperity, military spit and polish, and variety of entertainment.

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When the war came, things changed quickly. The holiday mood that had greeted its outbreak by a confident nation vanished as the number of German casualties soared. Food rationing, shortages of every kind, and growing lists of killed and wounded dominated everyday life. In school, the girls knitted gloves, sweaters, and scarves for the troops at the front. Dietrich’s favorite teacher, Marguerite Bréguand, a young woman with whom she had eagerly practiced her French, was now gone. Indeed, the speaking of French and English had come to be perceived as almost treasonous.

Classmates appeared in the cold and gloomy schoolrooms wearing new black bands on the sleeves of their heavy sweaters, indicating the deaths of male relatives. Dietrich wore one, too, when, in 1918, her stepfather died in Russia.

Life’s Work

That same year, World War I ended. Dietrich had not missed her second father, a remote figure. Instead, she had enjoyed the additional freedom won at his departure and the company of women: her sister, mother, aunt, and grandmother. For the remainder of her life, she had mixed feelings about men, often preferring those in distress, but she treasured relationships with including romantic attachments to women.

In Berlin, unemployment and inflation raged. Youthful prostitutes haunted street corners. The urge to forget found expression in the new lifestyles of the Jazz Age, breeding excesses of every kind. However, Leni Dietrich now calling herself “Marlene” (an elision of Maria and Magdelena) found the Roaring Twenties exhilarating. A new name, a new city, new habits such as smoking and wearing men’s attire and a new life seemed to suit her. Photographs from these years show not the Dietrich of prominent cheekbones with heavily lidded eyes, but a plump, not-very-tall flapper with bobbed hair, cloche hats, and a tiny red mouth.

Dietrich enrolled in drama school and auditioned for whatever parts were available at Berlin’s theaters and new film studios. In 1922, she landed her first role in a forgotten silent film, Der kleine Napoleon (1923; little Napoleon). The next year saw her in Tragödie der Liebe (1923; Tragedy of Love, 1923) starring Emil Jannings, a widely known actor of stage and screen. On that set, she met Rudolf Sieber, whom she married on May 17, 1923. Sieber, the father of her only child, Maria, born on December 13, 1924, remained her husband until his death in the United States in 1976. Their relationship, which was exemplary in many ways, did not long include marital fidelity. Both turned to other sexual partners; Dietrich acquired scores of them in her long life, a practice that was only whispered about during her years of fame.

Dietrich appeared briefly in a number of films and plays until 1930, when she found herself sharing the screen again with Jannings in the German-language film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1931). The Blue Angel was the brainchild of Josef von Sternberg. While the “von” was bogus, the man decidedly was not. His discovery of Marlene and hers of him has the drama of the Pygmalion myth, for like Pygmalion, who turned his statue into a living woman, Sternberg turned a pudgy starlet into Marlene Dietrich while falling in love with her. The Blue Angel tells the story of a pompous teacher who is undone by a cabaret temptress who shows lots of black silk-clad leg and sings in a smoky contralto. On the strength of The Blue Angel’s European success and von Sternberg’s recommendations, Paramount Pictures beckoned, believing that Dietrich could be an appropriate competitor for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s smoldering Swedish beauty Greta Garbo.

The 1930’s witnessed the creation of the Dietrich legend, the fabulous American film star of Hollywood’s golden age. Earning enormous sums in the Depression (in 1936, she was the highest-paid woman in the world), photographed nightly at tables with several leading men often her lovers Dietrich lived the romantic existence others dreamed about. Her first American film, Morocco (1930), with Gary Cooper, was a smash. Von Sternberg’s lighting created a hollow-cheeked mystery woman who follows her legionnaire into the desert, a creature who is self-willed, passionate, true to her own code, and somehow more human than Garbo. After Dishonored (1931), Dietrich returned to Germany to retrieve her daughter though not her husband and an old roommate (and lover), Gerda Hubner.

Her return to the United States saw a retroactive suit filed against her by von Sternberg’s former wife, but the presence of her six-year-old daughter and ultimately her husband in July of 1931 silenced the wagging tongues of Americans who were incapable of conceiving family situations as bizarre as those in which Dietrich and Sieber regularly found themselves.

Near the end of the decade, however, Dietrich saw her popularity in serious decline: One trade publication called her “box office poison.” Dreadful films such as The Scarlet Empress (1934), The Garden of Allah (1936), Knight Without Armor (1936), and Angel (1937) were partially responsible, but new audiences were no longer satisfied with the escapist kitsch that Depression filmgoers had sought, and techniques in lighting and cinematography led away from the make-believe of earlier years.

In 1939, after ending a romance with film star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., to begin a more intense one with the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, Dietrich received the offer of a role in a Western with James Stewart.Destry Rides Again (1939) proved to be a hit, and it put Dietrich’s career back on track. Her next film was Seven Sinners (1940), the first of three with John Wayne.

In the 1940’s, she engineered another headline romance, this time with Jean Gabin, the homesick French refugee actor, whom she mothered as she often did her men with home-cooked pot au feu. In 1944, she broke off acting to entertain troops and make propaganda broadcasts for the Allies, for which activities she accumulated medals and citations. America’s youngest general, James M. Gavin, was smitten with her, to the distress of Gabin, with whom she filmed the dreary Martin Roumaganic (1946). A Foreign Affair (1948), directed by German émigré Billy Wilder, was, in contrast, a triumph. In it, she projected what she had become, the woman who has seen it all and survived, though at the expense of a few illusions “Illusions” was also the memorable Frederick Hollander song she sang in the film.

In the 1950’s, Dietrich made fewer films than she had in her heyday. She interested herself in her daughter’s family while continuing to form new intimate relationships with both men and women, most notably with actor Yul Brynner (who was twenty years younger than she) and singer Frank Sinatra.

When Las Vegas came into prominence, Dietrich joined high-paid celebrities there. Audiences took shocked notice of her gown, all but transparent to the waist, which soon became a trademark proof that her famous figure was impervious to age. Few suspected that its careful construction hid a special elasticized foundation. The stage act she had introduced in troop shows grew ever more polished in Europe, South America, and eventually Israel, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. In 1959, with great courage, she returned to a Germany that had not completely forgiven her for her wartime hostility. At that time, she conducted a passionate affair with her musical director Burt Bacharach, who was almost thirty years her junior.

World tours continued for another seventeen years while Dietrich grew more obsessed with her appearance, forbidding photographs and becoming increasingly intractable. Her makeup rituals consumed hours as she attempted to disguise her age. In 1976, after her husband’s death, she retreated to her Paris apartment, where she slowly cut herself off from her remaining friends. A drinking problem that began late in her life grew more severe, and her last years were mostly spent bedridden in a cluttered apartment until her death at age ninety on May 6, 1992.

Significance

When the biography Marlene Dietrich appeared in 1993, readers found it a shocking indictment, but in accusing her mother of each of the seven deadly sins and then some author Maria Riva only made more apparent how completely Dietrich’s admirers had accepted the legend that the star had created. That the legend was less than true made little difference, since actors are ultimately judged by how well they play their roles.

If her generosity was limited, so be it. She seemed to lavish her wealth on others. If she were mean-spirited and dishonest, Americans had no knowledge of it. They saw instead a woman who had frequented the Stork Club entertaining soldiers in muddy fields. Dietrich appeared to be earthy, not lewd; passionate, not conniving; loving, not thoughtless. She seemed to be beautiful, sexy, and vulnerable. She had wit, spoke three languages, and fascinated both men and women. She did it “her way” long before her lover Sinatra made those words famous.

Bibliography

Bach, Steven. Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. 1992. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. A bulky, richly illustrated biography, well researched and informative written from the perspective of an admirer. Bach conveys the impression shared by many that Dietrich was able to make individuals and audiences alike feel as if they were alone with her. The book stresses her performing audacity and her use of sex as both control and for reward for good behavior in personal relations. There is much interesting analysis of the symbiosis of von Sternberg and Dietrich, with Dietrich’s role emerging larger than her mentor’s; furthermore, Bach deals successfully with the problem of Dietrich’s zigzagging from the practical and down-to-earth to the wildly romantic.

Dietrich, Marlene. Marlene. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. New York: Grove Press, 1989. An autobiography meant to perpetuate the Dietrich legend. Dietrich leaves out far more than she tells, changing events to suit herself and trimming casts of characters for dramatic effect. Her sister vanishes, her two fathers become one, and her husband barely surfaces. She does, however, stress those moments and events that most affected her, which may make this book valuable to the student of her life.

Higham, Charles. Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. This work is outdated, but Higham shows great sensitivity in presenting the public Dietrich. Appreciative and gentle, the book is neither sentimental nor naïve.

Riva, J. David, ed. A Woman at War: Marlene Dietrich Remembered. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2006. A collection of photos of and interviews with Dietrich recount her life and personality during World War II.

Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. This is an expansive, bitter biography in the vein of Mommie Dearest (1978), film star Joan Crawford’s daughter’s searing indictment of her mother. Dietrich’s only child can forgive neither her mother nor her father. Although Riva doubtless exaggerates Dietrich’s failings, the book has a ring of truth to it and is based on documents denied to others. Contains numerous pictures but lacks an index.

Skærved, Malene Sheppard. Dietrich. London: Haus, 2003. Relatively brief but comprehensive chronological account of Dietrich’s life. Skærved describes Dietrich as a woman who was able to exert a great deal of control over her career and public persona.

Spoto, Donald. Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich. 1992. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. This biography was written during Dietrich’s last years in Paris, when gossip and celebrity memoirs had begun to explode her myth and her indiscreet telephone calls contributed to the destruction. Spoto’s wide knowledge of Hollywood’s public and private lives, together with his technical grasp of the film business and interest in motion pictures, makes the book especially rewarding. Although Berlin escapes him slightly, Spoto has the advantage of having studied the émigré mentality in scores of other film figures.

1901-1940: 1930-1935: Von Sternberg Makes Dietrich a Superstar.