MARLENE DIETRICH, THE BLUE GERMAN-AMERICAN ANGEL

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Marlene Dietrich, the German and American actress and singer, who was born on a day like today in 1901.

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich (27 December 1901-6 May 1992) was a German-American actress and singer whose career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s.

In 1920s Berlin, Dietrich performed on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) brought her international acclaim and a contract with Paramount Pictures. She starred in many Hollywood films, including six iconic roles directed by Sternberg: Morocco (1930) (her only Academy Award nomination), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), Desire (1936) and Destry Rides Again (1939).

She successfully traded on her glamorous persona and exotic looks, and became one of the era's highest-paid actresses. Throughout World War II she was a high-profile entertainer in the United States.

Although she delivered notable performances in several post-war films, including Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) and Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), she spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a marquee live-show performer.

Dietrich was known for her humanitarian efforts during World War II, housing German and French exiles, providing financial support and even advocating their American citizenship. For her work on improving morale on the front lines during the war, she received several honors from the United States, France, Belgium and Israel.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth greatest female screen legend of classic Hollywood cinema.

More information: National Women's History Museum

She was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich, at Leberstraße 65 in the neighborhood of Rote Insel in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine (née Felsing), was from an affluent Berlin family who owned a jewelry and clock-making firm. Her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant.

Dietrich had one sibling, Elisabeth, who was one year older. Dietrich's father died in 1907. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic first lieutenant in the Grenadiers, courted Wilhelmina and married her in 1914, but he died in July 1916 from injuries sustained during the First World War. Von Losch never officially adopted the Dietrich sisters, so Dietrich's surname was never von Losch, as has sometimes been claimed.

Dietrich's film debut was a small part in the film The Little Napoleon (1923). She met her future husband, Rudolf Sieber, on the set of Tragedy of Love in 1923. Dietrich and Sieber were married in a civil ceremony in Berlin on 17 May 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, was born on 13 December 1924.

In 1929, Dietrich landed her breakthrough role of Lola Lola, a cabaret singer who caused the downfall of a hitherto respectable schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings), in the UFA production of The Blue Angel (1930), shot at Babelsberg film studios. Josef von Sternberg directed the film and thereafter took credit for having discovered Dietrich. The film introduced Dietrich's signature song Falling in Love Again, which she recorded for Electrola. She made further recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records.

On 6 May 1992, Dietrich died of kidney failure at her flat in Paris at age 90. Her funeral was a requiem mass conducted at the Roman Catholic church of La Madeleine in Paris on 14 May 1992.

More information: The German Way & More

When you're dead, you're dead. That's it.

Marlene Dietrich