Marlene Dietrich
1901 – 1992 · Germany
Known for: Star of The Blue Angel who chose exile and sang for the Allies rather than serve Hitler
“Here I stand at the marker of my days.”
Biography
Marlene Dietrich was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich in the Schöneberg district of Berlin in 1901, the daughter of a police lieutenant who died during the First World War and of a mother from a well established Berlin family of jewellers and clockmakers. At about eleven she folded her two given names into one and became Marlene. She studied the violin seriously and intended to play in concert halls until a wrist injury closed that road; her first paid engagement, in 1922, was in the pit orchestra of a Berlin cinema, and she was dismissed after four weeks. She turned to the stage instead, as a chorus girl in revues and in small parts at Max Reinhardt's theatres, and from 1923 to minor roles in film. By the end of the decade she was one of the busier young performers in Berlin and not yet a star.
That changed in 1930 with The Blue Angel, filmed at Babelsberg by Josef von Sternberg, in which she played the cabaret singer Lola Lola and introduced the song that stayed with her for sixty years. Paramount brought her to Hollywood at once, and between 1930 and 1935 she made six further films with von Sternberg, among them Morocco, which brought her only Academy Award nomination and the scene in which she performs in white tie and kisses a woman in the audience, as well as Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress. When the Nazi government pressed her to come home as the leading lady of German cinema, she refused, and in 1939 she took American citizenship. Through the Second World War she sang for Allied soldiers close to the front lines, sheltered and financed German and French exiles and argued for their naturalisation, work for which the United States, France, Belgium and Israel all decorated her.
After the war Dietrich worked with Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Stanley Kramer, in A Foreign Affair, Stage Fright, Witness for the Prosecution, Touch of Evil and Judgment at Nuremberg, but from the 1950s her real stage was the concert hall, and for two decades she toured the world alone in front of a curtain. A fall on stage in 1975 ended the touring, and she spent her last years withdrawn in her flat in Paris, receiving almost no one and keeping her friendships by telephone. She died there on 6 May 1992 at the age of ninety and was buried in Berlin, in the city she had left and where her refusal had long been held against her. In 1999 the American Film Institute placed her ninth among the female screen legends of classical Hollywood.