Marlene Dietrich

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born on 27 December 1901 at Leberstraße 65 in the Rote Insel neighborhood of Schöneberg, Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine, came from an affluent Berlin family that operated a jewelry and clock-making business, while her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, served as a police lieutenant. He died in August 1908, and Wilhelmina later married Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic first lieutenant in the Grenadiers, in 1914. Von Losch died in July 1916 from wounds sustained during the First World War and never formally adopted the Dietrich sisters, meaning Dietrich's surname remained Dietrich throughout her life. She had one sibling, Elisabeth, born 5 February 1900 and died 8 May 1973. Around age eleven, Dietrich combined her first two given names to create the name Marlene.

Dietrich attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls' School from 1907 to 1917 and graduated from the Victoria-Luise-Schule in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1918. As a teenager she studied violin and developed an interest in theater and poetry. A wrist injury ended her ambitions as a concert violinist, though by 1922 she had secured work playing violin in a pit orchestra at a Berlin cinema, a position she held for four weeks before being dismissed. Her earliest professional stage appearances came as a chorus girl in Guido Thielscher's Girl-Kabarett vaudeville entertainments and in Rudolf Nelson revues in Berlin. In 1922 she auditioned unsuccessfully for Max Reinhardt's drama academy but subsequently worked in his theaters as a chorus girl and in small dramatic roles.

Her film debut came with a minor part in The Little Napoleon in 1923. That same year she met Rudolf Sieber on the set of Tragedy of Love, and the two were married in a civil ceremony in Berlin on 17 May 1923. Their only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, was born on 13 December 1924. Throughout the 1920s Dietrich continued working on stage and in film in both Berlin and Vienna. Her stage roles during this period included parts in Frank Wedekind's Pandora's Box, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Misalliance. It was her work in musicals and revues — among them Broadway, Es Liegt in der Luft, and Zwei Krawatten — that drew the most attention. Her screen work in the late 1920s included roles in Café Elektric (1927), I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (1928), and The Ship of Lost Souls (1929).

In 1929 Dietrich was cast as Lola Lola, a cabaret singer whose allure destroys a respectable schoolmaster played by Emil Jannings, in the UFA production The Blue Angel, shot at Babelsberg film studios and directed by Josef von Sternberg. The film, released in 1930, brought Dietrich international recognition and introduced her signature song "Falling in Love Again," which she recorded for Electrola. She made additional recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records. On the strength of the film's international success, Dietrich moved to the United States under contract to Paramount Pictures, which had distributed The Blue Angel in the American market. Paramount sought to position her as a German counterpart to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Swedish star Greta Garbo.

Between 1930 and 1935, Dietrich starred in six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount. Morocco (1930), in which she appeared opposite Gary Cooper as a cabaret singer, earned her her only Academy Award nomination. The film is particularly remembered for a sequence in which her character, dressed in white tie, performs a song and kisses another woman. Dishonored (1931) with Victor McLaglen cast her as a Mata Hari-like spy and was a major commercial success. Shanghai Express (1932), co-starring Anna May Wong, earned $1.5 million in worldwide rentals. Blonde Venus (1932) featured Cary Grant, while The Scarlet Empress (1934) starred John Davis Lodge. The final collaboration, The Devil Is a Woman (1935), was the most stylized of the seven films and among the lowest-grossing, though Dietrich later remarked it was the production in which she appeared most beautiful. Working without von Sternberg for the first time in three years, she appeared in Song of Songs (1933), directed by Rouben Mamoulian, playing a naïve German peasant.

Following her peak Hollywood years, Dietrich spent much of the 1950s through the 1970s touring the world as a live-show performer. She nonetheless delivered notable performances in several postwar films, including Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Her Broadway engagement, titled Marlene Dietrich, ran from 1967 to 1968, representing her credited stage work in New York during that period.

During World War II, Dietrich was a prominent entertainer in the United States and performed for troops on the front lines. She also housed German and French exiles, provided them with financial support, and advocated on behalf of their American citizenship. For these contributions, she received honors from the United States, France, Belgium, and Israel. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Dietrich ninth on its list of the greatest female screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema. Her career as an actress and singer spanned nearly seven decades, beginning with stage and silent film work in 1920s Berlin and extending through her international concert touring.