Leni Stengel

Leni Stengel, born Magdalene Henriette Amalia Louise Riechers on 12 September 1901 in Oldenburg, Germany, was a German-born American actress and singer whose career spanned stage, film, and television from the 1920s through the 1950s. The daughter of Hermann August Riechers and his wife Magdalena Amanda Alma Riechers, she was a grandniece of the German composer Friedrich von Flotow. She immigrated to the United States in 1906 and received her education in schools in both New York City and Berlin. She graduated from Washington Irving High School in New York City and was a member of the Art Students League of New York as a young artist. She later pursued vocal training in Milan and Berlin.

Stengel made her professional stage debut in 1920 under the name Madeline Richers, joining the sextette chorus of the Shubert brothers' Broadway revival of Florodora after the artist Floyd Cragg recommended her to the producers. The Los Angeles Times noted at the time that she was a red-haired young woman with ambitions toward opera. On 5 March 1921 she married Hans Stengel, a cartoonist for the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal, and thereafter performed under the name Madeline or Leni Stengel. Following the Florodora revival she traveled to Europe, where she made a stage appearance at the German theatre in Riga and performed in ingenue roles in German operettas in Berlin. By January 1925 she had returned to the United States and was working in vaudeville in New Jersey and New York, billing her act as the "Continental Comedienne." She achieved headlining status on the B. F. Keith Circuit in Florida in February 1925 and continued touring through Louisiana, Alabama, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. that year. In June 1925 she starred in the musical revue Chatterbox at the Majestic Theatre in Brooklyn, a production by Will Morrissey and Jack M. Welch with a cast led by Hal Skelly. She also worked as a nightclub singer in Paris, Berlin, Atlantic City, and New York City during 1925 and 1926.

Her marriage to Hans Stengel ended in divorce in 1926, and he died by suicide two years later while hosting a party. In late 1926 Stengel appeared on Broadway in Princess Turandot, an adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's play at New York's Provincetown Playhouse, in which she played the role of Adelma. In May 1928 she starred in Patterson McNutt and Edwin Burke's Bed and Bored at the Cort Theatre in Jamaica, New York, and the Windsor Theatre in the Bronx. That September she portrayed Carlotta Barbe in Edward and Edith Ellis's play Women at the Adelphi Theatre in Philadelphia. She closed out 1928 at Broadway's Booth Theatre, playing Olga Bukarov in Leonard Ide's play These Few Ashes. In January 1929 she starred in the musical Cheer Up at the Boulevard Theatre alongside Don Barclay, and later that year she performed with Sterling Holloway in the Shoestring Revue at the Lyric Theatre in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Stengel transitioned to film work in 1929 with the role of Lady Roberts in Warner Bros.' German-language feature The Royal Box, an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's play Kean. She also appeared in the Vitaphone Varieties short The Master Sweeper for Warner Bros. in 1930. That same year she signed a three-year contract with RKO Radio Pictures. On Christmas Eve 1930 she married film director Boris Ingster in Los Angeles, obtaining a marriage license three days later on 27 December 1930, and subsequently became a naturalized American citizen. Her first full-length English-language film role was Olga in RKO's Half Shot at Sunrise, starring the comedy duo Wheeler and Woolsey, in which she and Robert Woolsey shared a comic dance routine. She appeared in a second Wheeler and Woolsey film for RKO, Cracked Nuts (1931), playing Queen Carlotta, and also performed alongside the duo in radio broadcasts, serving as the straight-man and romantic interest opposite Woolsey. Additional RKO credits included Beau Ideal (1931, as Zuleika) and The Animal Kingdom (1932, as cellist Franc Schmidt). While under contract at RKO she was also loaned to other studios, appearing in Paramount Pictures productions including The Road to Reno (1931, as Mrs. Stafford Howes), The Beloved Bachelor (1931, as Julie Stressman), Husband's Holiday (1930, as Molly Saunders), Luxury Liner (1933), and Kickin' the Crown Around (1933, as The Queen). She worked with Buster Keaton in Casanova wider Willen (1931), the German-language version of Parlor, Bedroom and Bath. For Fox Film Corporation she played Countess Vonesse in Man About Town (1932), for Columbia Pictures she appeared as Mrs. Landau in Hollywood Speaks (1932), and for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer she had an unnamed part in Just a Gigolo (1931) and played the German tourist Ilsa in The Barbarian (1933). She departed RKO in 1933, and in 1934 concluded her film career with two short films for Warner Bros. opposite Shemp Howard: Henry the Ache and Art Trouble.

Following the end of her film career, Stengel spent time in Berlin with her parents in the mid-1930s. Her marriage to Boris Ingster ended in divorce in 1937, and in 1938 she married Robert A. Scott, who died in 1956. She returned to Broadway in 1936, appearing as Madame Van Hemert in Jacques Deval's Tovarich. A decade later she made her final Broadway appearance as Sister Agatha in Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht's Swan Song (1946). In the early 1950s she worked in American television, appearing in the series The Clock in the episode "Accident on Canigou" (1951), in the Studio One episode "Wintertime" as a romantic rival to Anne Bancroft's character, and in Lights Out (1951, episode "Dark Image," as Carmelita). Stengel died in New York City on 1 July 1982 at the age of 80.