Dietrich, Marlene Magdalene b. December 27, 1901; Berlin- Schoneberg, Prussia d. May 6, 1992, Paris, France
Marlene Dietrich became one of the first and brightest movie stars. Her career endured for decades, challenging stereotypes about gender and age, until she became an international classic.
She grew up in a wealthy family near Berlin. After her dreams of becoming a violinist were quashed by a wrist injury, she joined the chorus line of a traveling musical review in 1921. She entered Max Reinhardt’s innovative drama school, taking small roles in German films and onstage with his theater company. Dietrich married Rudolf “Rudy” Sieber, a Czech production assistant, in 1924 and had a daughter, later the actress Maria Riva. Although never divorced, the couple lived separately until Sieber’s 1976 death.Dietrich became a popular leading lady in German films, many co-starring Emil Jannings: Napoleons kleiner Bruder (The Little Napoleon, 1922), Tragodie der Liebe (Tragedy ofLove, 1923), Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), Manon Lascaut (both 1925), Der Juxbaron (The Imaginary Baron, 1926), Eine DuB>a,rry von heute (A Modern Du Barry, 1927), Wenn ein Weib den Weg verliert (Cafe Elektric, 1927), Ich kusse Ihre Hand Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame, 1929), and Der Schiff der verlore- nen Menschen (The Ship of Lost Souls, 1929). Magazines compared her to Elisabeth Bergner and Greta Garbo. American director Josef von Sternberg chose her to star as seductive dance-hall vamp Lola Lola with Jannings in his Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), filmed in both German and English. The heroine impervious to romance, her songs epitomized sultry independence in a husky voice that became her trademark: “Ich Bin die Fesche Lola” (I’m Fancy Lola) and “Ein Richtiger Mann” (Tonight I’m Looking for a Man). “Ich Bin von Kopf bis Fuss” (Falling in Love Again... Can’t Help It) became her theme song. The role won her international fame and a contract with Paramount Pictures.
She left her husband and daughter to come to Hollywood as von Sternberg molded Dietrich’s glamorous, sensuous, mysterious persona. He called her his
“puppet” and directed her to lower her voice an octave, claiming to control “the depth of her thoughts” (Mordden 1983, 106). Her films included Morocco (1930), as a cabaret singer opposite Gary Cooper; Dishonored (1931), as a street walker turned spy; Blonde Venus (1932), opposite Gary Grant with a “Hot Voodoo” number she performed in a gorilla suit; Shanghai Express (1932), a $3 million box office success; and The Scarlet Empress (1934), as Catherine the Great. Von Sternberg’s wife Riza sued Dietrich for alienation of affection and libel, but Dietrich won the case by bringing her husband and daughter to the United States. Work with von Sternberg lasted through The Devil Is a Woman (1935), again as a cabaret singer.
Already she had made Song of Songs (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She continued with Desire and The Garden of Allah (both 1936), the latter produced by David O. Selznick. While filming Knight without Armor in England (1937), Nazi agent and ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop approached her with Adolf Hitler’s personal appeal to return to Germany to make films. Hitler banned her films due to her refusal, and she became a U.S. citizen that March.
Photoplay described Dietrich “of the heavy-lidded, inscrutable eyes” in a 1931 article, “Charm? No! You Must Have Glamour.” So popular was she that her mannish leisure pants created an unprecedented vogue among young American women. Scenes of her provocatively veiled in her cigarette smoke made smoking seem sexy and fashionable. Women tweezed eyebrows as she did and sucked lemons to keep their mouths tight but could not afford her other beauty secret—the halfounce of real gold dust Max Factor put in
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her hair for glitter during filming. She was the image of the independent woman for decades, challenging convention, hinting at secrets of multiple liasons, even bisexual.
She staged a “comeback” for Universal as Frenchy, a western saloon singer, opposite James Stewart in Destry Rides Again (1939), making “[See What] the Boys in the Back Room [Will Have]” a hit song (Mordden 1983, 110). Costume films followed: Seven Sinners (1940), The Flame of New Orleans (1941), Manpower (1941), and The Lady Is Willing (1942). In 1942, she co-starred with John Wayne and Randolph Scott in The Spoilers and Pittsburgh. She played a seductive harem dancer in Kismet (1944). During the war, she starred in war bond drives and entertained troops for the U.S.O., even near combat, over500 times. She accompanied Allied troops into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to liberate her sister. She made antiNazi propaganda broadcasts in German, later winning the U.S. War Department Medal of Freedom (1947) and the Cheva- liere medal of the French Legion of Honor.
After she played a gypsy in Golden Earrings (1947), the media in 1948 dubbed her “the World’s most glamorous grandmother” as her daughter gave birth to a son. She then made a string of films: A Foreign Affair (1948), as an ex-Nazi in Berlin’s ruins in the dark comedy for Billy Wilder; Stage Fright (1950), singing “La Vie en Rose”; No Highway in the Sky (1951); Rancho Notorious (1952), playing a saloon singer; The Monte Carlo Story (1957); Witness for the Prosecution (1957), as the wife of a murder suspect; Touch of Evil (1958), as a gypsy fortune-teller; and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), as a German aristocrat for Stanley Kramer. She had cameo roles in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Paris When It Sizzles (1964), and Just a Gigolo (1979).
Dietrich starred in two weekly radio dramas, Cafe Istanbul (1952) and Time for Love (1953). Into the 1970s, she epitomized glamorous aging, an unprecedented image. She forged a new career as a popular, sultry, world-weary cabaret performer and recording star with her trademark spo- ken/singing style at venues in Las Vegas, London, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Berlin.
Old friend Maximilian Schell made the film Marlene (1984) with her voiceover commentary because she refused to appear on camera.Dietrich lived most of her life in Paris and retreated to seclusion there for the last thirteen years of her life, dying of kidney failure at age ninety. Reluctant bureaucrats ceded to her desire to be buried in Friedhof III cemetery in Berlin-Friedenau. She left her memorabilia to the City of Berlin. In 2002, Berlin declared her an honorary citizen, “an ambassador for a democratic, freedom-loving and humane Germany” who personified “reconciliation.”
Blanche M. G. Linden
See also Films (German), American Influence on; Hollywood; Jannings, Emil; Reinhardt, Max; Sternberg, Josef von
References and Further Reading
Dickens, Homer. The Films of Marlene
Dietrich. New York: Citadel, 1971.
Frewin, Leslie. Dietrich: The Story of a Star. New York: Avon, 1967.
Higham, Charles. Marlene. Norton, 1977.
Mordden, Ethan. Movie Star: A Look at the
Women Who Made Hollywood. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Sternberg, Josef von. Fun in a Chinese Laundry. New York: Macmillan, 1965.