Marlene Dietrich

“Courage and grace are a formidable mixture.”

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

Dietrich was born on 27 December 1901 in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina, was from a wealthy Berlin family who owned a jewellery and clock-making company. Her father, Louis Dietrich, was a police lieutenant. Marie had one sibling, Elisabeth, who was one year older. Dietrich's father died in 1907. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic soldier married Wilhelmina in 1914, but he died in July 1916 from injuries sustained during the First World War.

Dietrich's family nicknamed her "Lena", "Lene", or "Leni". Around the age of 11, se combined her first two names to form the name "Marlene". In her teens, she studied the violin and became interested in theater and poetry. A wrist injury curtailed her dreams of becoming a concert violinist. By 1922 she had her first job, playing violin in a pit orchestra for silent films at a Berlin cinema – however she was fired after only four weeks.

The earliest professional stage appearances by Dietrich were as a chorus girl in Berlin. Her auditions to drama school were unsuccessful, however she soon found small roles in plays.

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.

Dietrich continued to work on stage and in film both in Berlin and Vienna throughout the 1920s. It was in musicals and revues, however, that she attracted the most attention. By the late 1920s, Dietrich was also playing sizable parts on screen.

In 1929, Dietrich landed her breakthrough role of Lola Lola, a cabaret singer who caused the downfall of a hitherto respectable schoolmaster 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 and later made further recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records. 

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“I am, at heart, a gentleman”.
In 1930, on the strength of The Blue Angel's international success, and with encouragement and promotion from Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich moved to the United States contracted to Paramount Pictures. The studio sought to market Dietrich as a German answer to Greta Garbo. Sternberg welcomed her with gifts including a green Rolls-Royce Phantom II.

Dietrich starred in six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount between 1930 and 1935. Von Sternberg worked effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous and mysterious femme fatale. He urged her to lose weight (puke) and coached her acting skills intensively. Unlike many performers, she willingly followed his sometimes domineering direction.

In Morocco (1930), Dietrich was again cast as a cabaret singer. The film is best remembered for the sequence in which she controversially performs a song dressed in a man's white tie and kisses another woman. The film earned Dietrich her only Academy Award nomination. I love this as it shows that the recent outrage against same-sex couples on screen is unfounded as this has been an occurrence for at least a century, and was critically acclaimed even then.

Morocco was followed by further successes in Dishonored (1931) and Shanghai Express (1932), which was was von Sternberg and Dietrich's biggest box office success, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1932. Conversely, Dietrich and Sternberg's last two films, The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935)—the most stylized of their collaborations—were their lowest-grossing films. Dietrich later remarked that she was at her most beautiful in The Devil Is a Woman.

Von Sternberg is renowned for his exceptional skill in lighting, and photographing Dietrich to optimum effect. He had a signature use of light and shadow, including the impact of light passed through a veil or slatted window blinds (as for example in Shanghai Express). This combined with meticulous attention to set design and costumes makes their films among cinema's most aesthetically stylish. Critics still vigorously debate how much of the credit belonged to von Sternberg and how much to Dietrich, but most would agree that neither consistently reached such heights again after Paramount fired von Sternberg and the two ceased working together. The collaboration of one actress and director creating seven films is still unmatched in motion pictures.

Dietrich's first film after the end of her partnership with von Sternberg was Frank Borzage's Desire (1936), a commercial success that gave Dietrich an opportunity to try her hand at rom-com. However, her next project ended in shambles when the film was scrapped several weeks into production owing to script problems, scheduling confusion and the studio's decision to fire the producer.

Extravagant offers lured Dietrich away from Paramount to make her first color film The Garden of Allah (1936) for independent producer David O. Selznick, for which she received $200,000, and to Britain for Alexander Korda's production, Knight Without Armour (1937), at a salary of $450,000, which made her one of the highest paid film stars of her day. While both films performed decently at the box office her public popularity had declined. American film exhibitors proclaimed her "box office poison" in May 1938, a distinction she shared with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Dolores del Río and Fred Astaire – so perhaps not such a devastating criticism after all.

The same year, she returned to Paramount to make Angel, another romcom. Sadly, the film was poorly received and Paramount to bought out the rest of her contract.

Dietrich, with encouragement from Josef von Sternberg, accepted producer Joe Pasternak's offer to play against type in her first film in two years: that of the cowboy saloon girl, Frenchie, in the western-comedy Destry Rides Again (1939), alongside with James Stewart. This was a significantly less well paid role than she had been accustomed. However, the bawdy role revived her career. 

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“The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.”

While in London, Marlene was approached by Nazi Party officials and offered lucrative contracts if she would return to Germany and star in the Third Reich. She refused their offers and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937.

Dietrich was known to have strong political convictions and the mind to speak them. In the late 1930s, Dietrich created a fund with Billy Wilder and several other exiles to help Jews and dissenters escape Germany. In 1937, her entire salary ($450,000) was put into helping refugees. In 1939, she became an American citizen and officially renounced her German citizenship. In December 1941, the U.S. entered World War II, and Dietrich became one of the first public figures to help sell war bonds. She toured the U.S. from January 1942 to September 1943 (appearing before 250,000 troops on the Pacific Coast leg of her tour alone) and was reported to have sold more war bonds than any other star.

During two extended tours in 1944 and 1945, she performed for Allied troops in Algeria, Italy, the UK, France, and the Netherlands, then entered Germany. When asked why she had done this, in spite of the obvious, she replied, "aus Anstand"—"out of decency". It was later remarked that she was at the front lines more than Eisenhower. During her show, Dietrich would inform the audience that she could read minds and ask them to concentrate on whatever came into their minds. Then she would walk over to a soldier and earnestly tell him, "Oh, think of something else. I can't possibly talk about that!" American church papers reportedly published stories complaining about this part of Dietrich's act.

In 1944, the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) initiated the Musak project, musical propaganda broadcasts designed to demoralize enemy soldiers. Dietrich, the only performer who was made aware that her recordings would be for OSS use, recorded a number of songs in German for the project, including "Lili Marleen", a favorite of soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Major General William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, wrote to Dietrich, "I am personally deeply grateful for your generosity in making these recordings for us."

At the war's end in Europe, Dietrich reunited with her sister Elisabeth, her brother-in-law and nephew – who had resided in Belsen throughout the war. They had run a cinema frequented by Nazi officers and officials who oversaw the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Dietrich's mother remained in Berlin during the war. Dietrich vouched for her sister and her sister's husband, sheltering them from possible prosecution as Nazi collaborators. However, she later completed disowned them and claimed to be an only child in accounts of her life. Perhaps she came to realise they were not as innocent as first proclaimed.

Dietrich received the Medal of Freedom in November 1947, for her "extraordinary record entertaining troops overseas during the war". She said this was her proudest accomplishment. She was also awarded the Légion d'honneur by the French government for her wartime work. 

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“Glamour is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it.”

While Dietrich never fully regained her former screen profile, she continued performing in motion pictures. From the early 1950s until the mid-1970s, Dietrich worked almost exclusively as a cabaret artist, performing live in large theatres in major cities globally.

In 1953, Dietrich was offered a then-substantial $30,000 per week to appear live in a short show at the Sahara Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Her daringly sheer "nude dress"—a heavily beaded evening gown of silk soufflé, which gave the illusion of transparency—designed by Jean Louis, attracted a lot of publicity. This engagement was so successful that she was signed to appear at the Café de Paris in London the following year; her Las Vegas contracts were also renewed.

Dietrich employed Burt Bacharach as her musical arranger starting in the mid-1950s; together, they refined her nightclub act into a more ambitious theatrical one-woman show with an expanded repertoire.  Bacharach's arrangements helped to disguise Dietrich's limited vocal range and allowed her to perform her songs to maximum dramatic effect; together, they recorded four albums and several singles between 1957 and 1964.

When Bacharach felt he needed to devote his full-time to songwriting, she wrote:

“From that fateful day on, I have worked like a robot, trying to recapture the wonderful woman he helped make out of me. I even succeeded in this effort for years, because I always thought of him, always longed for him, always looked for him in the wings, and always fought against self-pity ... He had become so indispensable to me that, without him, I no longer took much joy in singing. When he left me, I felt like giving everything up. I had lost my director, my support, my teacher, my maestro.”

She would often perform the first part of her show in one of her body-hugging dresses and a swansdown coat, and change to top hat and tails for the second half of the performance. This allowed her to sing songs usually performed by male singers.  

Even her critics begrudingly acknowledged her beguiling allure: "What she does is neither difficult nor diverting, but the fact that she does it at all fills the onlookers with wonder ... To these necessary elements (her own technical competence and her audience's sentimentality) Marlene Dietrich adds a third—the mysterious force of her belief in her own magic. Those who find themselves unable to share this belief tend to blame themselves rather than her."

Her use of body-sculpting undergarments, nonsurgical facelifts (tape), expert makeup and wigs, combined with careful stage lighting, helped to preserve Dietrich's glamorous image as she grew older. 

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“Words can bruise and break hearts, and minds as well. There are no black and blue marks, no broken bones to put in plaster casts, and therefore no prison bars for the offender.

Dietrich's return to West Germany in 1960 for a concert tour was met with mixed reception. She received constantly negative press, vocal protest by chauvinistic Germans who felt she had betrayed her homeland, and two bomb threats. During her performances at Berlin's Titania Palast theatre, protesters chanted, "Marlene Go Home!" Nevertheless, she attracted huge crowds and was warmly welcomed by other Germans, especially those who had similarly opposed the Nazis. This tour proved an artistic victory, but a financial failure. She was left emotionally drained by the hostility she received, and she left convinced never to visit again. East Germany, however, received her well.

Around this time, she also toured Israel. She was well-received despite breaking the official taboo against singing in German. In 1965, she became the first woman and German to receive the Israeli Medallion of Valor in 1965, "in recognition for her courageous adherence to principle and consistent record of friendship for the Jewish people". 

She performed on Broadway twice (in 1967 and 1968) and won a special Tony Award in 1968. Dietrich continued with a busy performance schedule until September 1975. When asked about why she continued to perform she said, "Do you think this is glamorous? That this is a great life, and that I do it for my health? Well, it isn't. It's hard work. And who would work if they didn't have to?"

In her 60s and 70s, Dietrich's health declined: she survived cervical cancer in 1965 and suffered from poor circulation in her legs. Dietrich became increasingly dependent on painkillers and alcohol. A stage fall at the Shady Grove Music Fair in Maryland in 1973 injured her left thigh, necessitating skin grafts to allow the wound to heal. She then fractured her right leg in August 1974.

Dietrich's show business career largely ended on 29 September 1975, when she fell from the stage and broke a thigh bone during a performance in Sydney, Australia. The following year, her husband, Rudolf Sieber, died of cancer on 24 June 1976. Dietrich's final on-camera film appearance was a brief appearance in Just a Gigolo (1979), starring David Bowie.

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“Being in the depths of sadness is just as important an experience as being exuberantly happy.”

Dietrich withdrew to her apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. She spent the final 13 years of her life reclusive and bedridden, allowing only a select few—including family and employees—to enter the apartment. During this period, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography Nehmt nur mein Leben (Take Just My Life), was published in 1979.

In 1982, Dietrich agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, Marlene (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director was allowed only to record her voice. Schell used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. Newsweek named it "a unique film, perhaps the most fascinating and affecting documentary ever made about a great movie star".

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2005, Dietrich's daughter and grandson said Dietrich was politically active during these years. She kept in contact with world leaders by telephone, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, running up a monthly bill of over $3,000. In 1989, her appeal to save the Babelsberg Studios from closure was broadcast on BBC Radio, and she spoke on television via telephone on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year. Also in spring 1990, she spoke on French forces radio station addressing her fellow Berliners in Germany about her then most recent conversation with former French president Mitterrand regarding his promise to her that Berlin will be the capital city of a united Germany later on—at that point in time, a quite appealing but non-official French presidential statement.

On 6 May 1992, Dietrich died of kidney failure at her flat in Paris at age 90. Her funeral was a requiem mass conducted in Paris on 14 May 1992. It was attended by c.1500 mourners in the church itself—including several international ambassadors—with thousands more fans outside. Her closed coffin, draped in the French flag, rested beneath the altar and was adorned with a simple bouquet of white wildflowers and roses from the French President François Mitterrand. Three medals were displayed at the foot of the coffin, military style, for a ceremony symbolising the sense of duty Dietrich embodied throughout her career. The officiating priest remarked: "Everyone knew her life as an artist of film and song, and everyone knew her tough stands ... She lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier".

In her will Dietrich expressed the wish to be buried in her birthplace Berlin, near her family. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall her body was flown there to fulfill her wish on 16 May. Her coffin was draped in an American flag befitting her status as an American. As her coffin traveled through Berlin bystanders threw flowers onto it, a fitting tribute because Dietrich loved flowers, even saving the flowers thrown to her at the end of her performances for use in subsequent shows. Dietrich was interred close by the grave of her mother and near the house where she was born.

On 24 October 1993, the largest portion of Dietrich's estate was sold for $5million to the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek—after U.S. institutions showed no interest. It became the core of the exhibition at the Filmmuseum Berlin. The collection includes: over 3,000 textile items from the 1920s to the 1990s, including film and stage costumes as well as over a thousand items from Dietrich's personal wardrobe; 15,000 photographs, 300,000 pages of documents, as well as other items like film posters and sound recordings. 

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“Love for the joy of loving, and not for the offerings of someone else's heart.”

Unlike her professional career, which was carefully crafted and preserved, Dietrich's personal life was largely kept out of public view. She was fluent in German, English, and French.

Dietrich married only once, to assistant director Rudolf Sieber, who later became an assistant director at Paramount Pictures in France, responsible for foreign language dubbing. Dietrich's only child, Maria Riva, would later become an actress too. When Maria gave birth to a son in 1948, Dietrich was dubbed "the world's most glamorous grandmother".

Dietrich was raised in the German Lutheran tradition of Christianity, but she abandoned it as a result of her experiences as a teenager during World War I, after hearing preachers from both sides invoking God as their support. "I lost my faith during the war and can't believe they are all up there, flying around or sitting at tables, all those I've lost." Quoting Goethe in her autobiography, she wrote, "If God created this world, he should review his plan."

Throughout her career, Dietrich had numerous affairs, some short-lived, some lasting decades, often overlapping and almost all known to her husband, to whom she was habitually showed the intimate letters from her lovers, sometimes with scathing comments. When Dietrich arrived in Hollywood and filmed Morocco (1930), she had an affair with Gary Cooper, even though he was having another affair with Mexican actress Lupe Vélez. Vélez once said, "If I had the opportunity to do so, I would tear out Marlene Dietrich's eyes." Another one of her affairs was with actor John Gilbert, whose untimely death was noted as one of the most traumatic events in her life. Dietrich also had brief affairs with Joan Crawford’s husband, and with co-star James Stewart. According to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich, Marlene became pregnant as a result of the affair but had a secret abortion without telling Stewart. 

When Dietrich was in her 50s, she had a relationship with actor Yul Brynner, which lasted more than a decade. Dietrich's love life continued into her 70s. She impressively counted Errol Flynn, George Bernard Shaw, John F. Kennedy, Joe Kennedy, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Frank Sinatra among her conquests. Dietrich maintained her husband and his mistress first in Europe and later on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, near Hollywood.

It is worth noting that Dietrich cannot thoroughly be called a feminist. She frequently spoke in defense of male superiority, and of a woman’s “need for a master”. Thus, one must be wary of overestimating her progressive values. However, she was also outspoken on a man’s lustful and superficial nature, and there is I guess something to be said for the fact that she was equally critical of men and women in certain respects.

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“In Europe, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman - we make love with anyone we find attractive.”

Dietrich, who was bisexual, enjoyed the thriving gay bars and drag balls of 1920s Berlin. She also defied conventional gender roles through her boxing at Turkish trainer and prizefighter Sabri Mahir's boxing studio in Berlin, which opened to women in the late 1920s.

In Paris, Dietrich had an affair with Suzanne Baulé, known as Frede, a coach and cabaret hostess whom she met in 1936 at the Monocle, a women's nightclub. The two women remained friends until the 1970s. “Sewing circle” was a phrase used by Dietrich to describe the underground, closeted lesbian and bisexual film actresses and their relationships in Hollywood. In the supposed "Marlene's Sewing Circle"  are mentioned the names of other close friends such as Ann Warner (the wife of Jack L. Warner, one of the owners of the Warner studios), Lili Damita (an old friend of Marlene's from Berlin and the wife of Errol Flynn), Claudette Colbert, and Dolores del Río (whom Dietrich considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood). The French singer Edith Piaf was also one of Dietrich's closest friends during her stay in Paris in the 1950s, and there were rumors that they were more “friends with benefits”.

Dietrich was an icon to fashion designers and screen stars. She especially favoured Dior. In an interview with The Observer in 1960, she said, "I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men. If I dressed for myself I wouldn't bother at all. Clothes bore me. I'd wear jeans. I adore jeans. I get them in a public store – men's, of course; I can't wear women's trousers. But I dress for the profession." 

In 2017, Swarovski commissioned a $60,000 Art Deco-styled dress in the style of her famous "nude dress", from Berlin-based fashion tech company ElektroCouture to honor Dietrich 25 years after her death. It contains 2,000 crystals in addition to 150 LED lights. ElektroCouture’s Lisa Lang said that the dress was inspired by electrical diagrams and correspondence that took place between the actress and fashion designer Jean Louis in 1958: "She wanted a dress that glows, she wanted to be able to control it herself from the stage and she knew she could have died of an electric stroke had it ever been realized."

Her public image included openly defying sexual norms, and she was known for her androgynous film roles and her bisexuality.

A significant volume of academic literature, especially since 1975, analyzes Dietrich's image. Emphasis is placed, inter alia, on the "fetishistic" manipulation of the female image. 

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“I do not think that we have a “right” to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.”

For some Germans, Dietrich remained a controversial figure for having “betrayed” her country during the war. In 1996, it was decided not to name a street after her in her birthplace.  However, on 8 November 1997, the central Marlene-Dietrich-Platz was unveiled in Berlin. The commemoration reads: Berliner Weltstar des Films und des Chansons. Einsatz für Freiheit und Demokratie, für Berlin und Deutschland ("Berlin world star of film and song. Dedication to freedom and democracy, to Berlin and Germany").

Dietrich was made an honorary citizen of Berlin on 16 May 2002. Translated from German, her memorial plaque reads: ‘“Tell me where the flowers are”. Marlene Dietrich/27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992/Actress and singer/ She was one of the few German actresses that attained international significance/Despite tempting offers by the Nazi regime, she emigrated to the USA and became an American citizen/In 2002, the city of Berlin posthumously made her an honorary citizen/"I am, thank God, a Berliner."’

Dietrich is referenced in a number of popular 20th century songs, including Rodgers and Hart's "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" (1935), Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?" (1969), Suzanne Vega's "Marlene On The Wall" (1985), and Madonna's "Vogue" (1990).

In 2000 a German biopic film Marlene was made, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and starring Katja Flint as Dietrich.

On 27 December 2017, she was given a Google Doodle on the 116th anniversary of her birth. The doodle was designed by American drag artist Sasha Velour, who cites Dietrich as a big inspiration due to her "gender-bending" fashion and political views. She has also been honoured on RuPaul's Drag Race. On 14 May 2020, she was part of an Entertainment Weekly cover celebrating LBGTQ celebrities.

It is unsurprising that Dietrich has been hailed as a queer icon. Not only was she gorgeous and stylish, she was a passionate fighter against fascism and anti-semitism, but she defied all the gender and sexual norms of her day. It is worth noting that Dietrich cannot truly be called a feminist. She frequently spoke in defense of male superiority, and of a woman’s “need for a master”. Thus, one must be wary of overestimating her progressive values. However, she was also outspoken on a man’s lustful and superficial nature, and there is I guess something to be said for the fact that she was equally critical of men and women in certain respects. Her career (and personal life) are a testament to the fact that liberal understandings of gender and sexuality and “snowflake” politics of equality and religious tolerance are not new, radical, millenial concepts, but were a key part of the golden days of Hollywood.