Top 100 German Actresses
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A prominent German film actress born on 30 September 1887 at Madiven, Java, the daughter of a forest ranger in the service of the Dutch authorities. Sent at the age of ten to Baden-Baden to study, she later entered the cinema thanks to her marriage in 1917 to the actor Fritz Dagover who was 25 years her senior. They divorced in 1919 but not before he had introduced her to director Robert Wiene and other notables of German cinema. She made her screen debut in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919). Immediately after she appeared in Wiene's classic expressionist film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (aka The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)). Apart from three trips -- one to Sweden in 1927, another to France in 1928-9 and one to Hollywood in 1931 -- most of Lil Dagover's career and fate was linked to that of the German cinema, where her role was usually that of the frail, menaced heroine. She continued to star in a great number of films during the Nazi era. Among her best performances were her roles in Congress Dances (1931), in Gerhard Lamprecht's The Higher Command (1935) and in Veit Harlan's The Kreutzer Sonata (1937). She also acted in the Deutsches Theatre Berlin, the Salzburg Festival, at forces shows and at war theaters. At one time, she was reported to have been a close friend of Adolf Hitler. In 1944, she received the War Merits Cross. Dagover continued her career in post-war Germany, playing many supporting parts until the late 1970s.- Greta Schröder was a German actress. She is best known for the role of Thomas Hutter's wife in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu. In the fictionalized 2000 film, Shadow of the Vampire, she is portrayed as having been a famous actress during the making of Nosferatu, but in fact she was little known.
The peak of her career was during the 1920s, and she continued to act well into the 1950s, but by the 1930s her roles had diminished to only occasional appearances.
Greta Schröder died on 8 June 1980 at the age of 87. - Actress
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Born in 1895 in Magdeburg, Germany, Margarete Schön made her stage debut in 1912. She was a member of the Deutschen Theater in Hannover from 1915-18 and Berlin's Staatstheater from 1918-45. She had a few roles in silent films, notably as Kriemhild in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge (1924), but with the coming of sound she went from starring roles to supporting parts as mothers and wives. After World War II she was under contract to the East German film company Defa, from 1948-50. She later worked on radio doing plays and narrating documentaries, as well as plays for children. She died in Berlin in 1985.- Maly Delschaft was born on 4 December 1898 in Hamburg, Germany. She was an actress, known for The Last Laugh (1924), Emilia Galotti (1958) and Im weißen Rößl (1926). She died on 20 August 1995 in Berlin, Germany.
- Emilie Kurz was born on 17 July 1874. She was an actress, known for The Last Laugh (1924), The Burning Soil (1922) and Die Tochter des Mehemed (1919). She died in 1934.
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The daughter of a railroad official, Camilla Horn was educated in Germany and Switzerland. She initially trained as a dressmaker and received her first job experience in a fashion salon in Erfurt. This was merely a stepping stone for a performing career which began with dance lessons in Berlin and subsequent acting studies under Lucie Höflich. The lithe, blond and strikingly beautiful Camilla soon appeared in cabaret revues staged by Rudolf Nelson. By 1926, she was employed as an extra at Ufa, where she was spotted by the director F.W. Murnau, who found in her the ideal representation of Gretchen for his seminal production of Faust (1926) . The role catapulted Camilla to instant stardom. Within a year, she was signed by United Artists in Hollywood, befriending Charles Chaplin and, more importantly, studio chairman Joseph M. Schenck. The friendship with Schenck may, or may not, have led to an affair -- depending on which story one is to believe -- but it did result in two high profile starring roles opposite John Barrymore in the torrid melodramas Tempest (1928) and Eternal Love (1929), both produced by Schenck. Neither film was a commercial success.
With the coming of sound, Camilla returned to Europe, briefly appearing on stage in London and Paris, before resuming her screen career in Germany. As the 1930's went on, she rarely turned down a role, playing anything from baronesses and fashion models, to vamps and 'fallen women'. The quality of her films was variable, but there were several noteworthy standouts, such as Hans in allen Gassen (1930) (opposite Hans Albers), The Last Waltz (1934) and Fahrendes Volk (1938) (as a circus artiste, again with Albers).
During this tumultuous decade, Camilla conducted a lengthy affair with the singer Louis Graveure, fifteen years her senior. This came to an end in 1938, when Graveure was suspected of espionage by the Gestapo and fled to England, via the Cote d'Azure. After her luxury villa in Berlin was ransacked in search for non-existent clues, Camilla's outspoken criticism of the Nazi regime reached a point where it got her into serious trouble. She saw out the first half of her career with a trio of long forgotten films made in Italy. Having failed in an attempt to flee to Switzerland, she kept a low profile and even tried her hand at farming. After the war, she had a stint as an interpreter for the occupying U.S. forces in Germany. Camilla made a successful return to the stage in a 1948 Frankfurt production of Jean Cocteau's "L'Aigle a Deux Tetes" (aka 'The Eagle Has Two Heads'). She spent the latter half of her acting career playing grand dames, matriarchs and worldly ladies with colourful backgrounds, in both films and on television. In 1974, she was awarded the 'Filmband in Gold' (also known as 'Lola') for lifetime achievement in the German film industry. In her 1985 autobiography, "Verliebt in die Liebe" ('In Love with Love'), she happily recounted her marriages and liaisons.- Born in Berlin, Germany. After her role in Metropolis (1927) she made a string of movies in which she almost always had the starring role, easily making the transition to sound films. Her last film was An Ideal Spouse (1935) which was released in 1935. She died on June 11th 1996 of heart failure in Ascona, Switzerland.
- Gertrud Pfiel was born in present day Croatia, the daughter of an engineer and inventor. A strikingly beautiful blonde with high cheekbones and expressive blue eyes, she grew up in Vienna where she was trained as a singer and dancer, embarking on a theatrical career by the age of fifteen. Until 1944, 'Gertraud' regularly performed at various theatres in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna. During a performance, she came to the attention of the director Fritz Lang, who became instantly enamored with her. Without an audition, Lang gave her a starring role as a defecting Russian spy in Spies (1928), the success of which led to further back-to-back leads in Woman in the Moon (1929) and Hochverrat (1929).
Lang eventually left his wife and long-time collaborator, the screenwriter Thea von Harbou, while Gerda Maurus went onto marry another prolific director, Robert A. Stemmle, who directed her in Daphne und der Diplomat (1937). During the sound era, Gerda was intermittently given further opportunities to shine, including opposite Hans Albers (Dope (1932)) and Paul Hörbiger (Prinzessin Sissy (1939)), but she seemed somehow unable to repeat the success of her earlier (silent) films. Her association, however tenuous, with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels tainted her career during the immediate post-war period. While her acting ban was eventually lifted, she rarely again graced the screen, but for several more years continued on as a stage actress in Munich and Düsseldorf. - Dutch actress Lien Deyers was discovered by the great German director Fritz Lang, who gave her a part in his film Spies (1928). After that she became a big star in Germany and appeared in many successful films in the 1930s. She married director Alfred Zeisler. When the Nazis came to power, she and her Jewish husband left Germany for England. There she couldn't find work in the film business, so she and her husband went to the US to try their luck.
In the US things went from bad to worse. Unable to find work in Hollywood, she was forced to take jobs outside the business. Her marriage to Zeisler eventually failed, and she took to the bottle to solve her problems. She soon became an alcoholic and had numerous run-ins with the law. She married and divorced a few times, but soon completely vanished from the public view. The last time she was heard from was in 1964, when she was in a Las Vegas (NV) jail. It is thought that she died shortly after that. - Actress
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Lilian Harvey was born on January 19th, 1906 in London. Her mother was English and her father was German. When she was eight her family moved to Berlin shortly before the outbreak of WW1. She spent much of the war at school in Switzerland where she broadened her knowledge of languages and classical dance.
After graduating high school in Berlin, she worked in theatre revues before debuting in her first film "Der Fluch" for Robert Land. After many roles in silent films, UFA found great use for her acting, dancing and language skills in many famous light operettas made with the advent of sound. These highly popular films (usually co-starring Willy Fritsch, with whom she became irrevocably associated in the public's mind as the romantic dream-team of the European cinema) were usually made in three different languages at once. The cast would be switched around her for the various takes in German, French and English (Laurence Olivier had his first film role in one of her vehicles).
Her most successful film, 1931's "Der Kongress Tanzt"/"Le congress s'amuse"/"Congress Dances" led to a contract in Hollywood with the Fox Film Company. She dissolved this contract after a few pictures, walking out on a role that was filled by then-unknown Alice Faye and returning to UFA to be with director Paul Martin, with whom she was romantically involved. The Nazi regime had come to power in her absence and Lilian Harvey found it difficult to work under Goebbels.
She was instrumental in helping those persecuted by the Nazis escape until her film popularity waned and she was forced to escape as well. She eventually landed in the USA and spent most of WW2 in Los Angeles working as a volunteer nurse. Her former directors and co-workers like Michael Curtiz and Billy Wilder remained social contacts, but the stigma of having been UFA's biggest star of the early thirties kept her from reigniting her own film career. She did theatre work and continued to work on European stages after the war. She received war reparations in the early sixties and lived on the Riviera until her death on July 27th, 1968.- Actress
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Rosa Valetti was born Rosa Alice Vallentin, the daughter of industrialist Felix Vallentin and his wife, Bertha. Her brother was actor Hermann Vallentin, who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. She first appeared on the Berlin stage and later also in Paris, Brussells and Vienna. During the First World War, she worked with Ludwig Roth, her first husband, at the Residenz-Theater in Berlin. She also worked as a director and acted in many theaters. A meeting with Kurt Tucholsky gave her an opportunity to work in cabaret, firstly in "Schall und Rauch." Valetti produced her own cabaret show "Café Grössenwahn" in 1920, then "Die Rampe" in 1922, and "Comedia Valetti" in 1923.
Valetti played in many cabarets around Europe and appeared in the premiere of "Die Dreigroschenoper" ("The Three Penny Opera"). In all, she appeared in more than 40 films, including in 1930 's "Der Blaue Engel" (The Blue Angel) with Marlene Dietrich. In 1933, she left Nazi Germany for Vienna and worked until 1935 at the Theater at der Josefstadt, also making guest appearances in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1934, she moved back to Berlin and then in 1936 to Palestine. She died the following year in Vienna. Her only child, her daughter Elisabeth, an actress known as Lisl Valetti, emigrated to the USA.- Actress
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Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer. While best remembered in the U.S. for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963), she is celebrated in Germany for her ground-breaking performances in the plays of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and her recordings of songs from those works.
She was born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (at that time Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a working class family. Young Lenya was fond of dancing. In 1914 she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There she began using her stage name, Lotte Lenya. In Swizerland she studied classical dance, singing and acting and made her stage debut at the Schauspielhaus. In 1921 she moved to Berlin and blended in the city's cosmopolitan cultural milieu. In 1924 she met composer Kurt Weill, and they married in 1926. She performed in several productions of 'The Threepenny Opera', which became an important step in her acting career.
In 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, Lotte Lenya escaped from the country. At the same time, being stressed by the circumstances of life, she divorced from Kurt Weil, to be reunited with him two years later. In 1935 both emigrated to the United States and remarried in 1937. After Kurt Weill's death, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill's music played in numerous productions worldwide. In 1957 she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of 'The Threepenny Opera'.
Lotte Lenya shot to international fame with her portrayal of Contessa Magda Terbilli-Gozales, Vivien Leigh's friend in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). The role brought Lenya an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She gained additional fame after she appeared as Rosa Klebb, former head of operations for SMERSH/KGB, and now a sadistic Spectre agent with poisonous knife in her shoe, in From Russia with Love (1963). She died of cancer on November 27, 1981, in New York. She is entombed with Kurt Weill in a mausoleum, in Mount Repose Cemetery, in Haverstraw, New York, USA.- An ardent supporter of the KPD, the German communist party, Neher left Germany shortly after the Nazi took over and emigrated to Prague, then to Moscow where she appeared on the stage as a cabaret artiste. In the spring of 1936, Anatol Becker, Neher's husband -also an ardent communist, was arrested and imprisoned on charges of "Terrorist Activities". He was accused of planning an assassination attempt on the person of Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. Following his incarceration, Carola Neher relentlessly searched for him, going from prison to prison trying to trace his whereabouts. This was a very perilous activity given that she was herself under surveillance by the Secret Police. In her secret file, recently found in the KGB archives, she was already branded as an "adventuress with anti-soviet sympathies", which at the time equated to a death sentence by the Moskow regime. She was finally arrested and sent to prison a few months later. She endured exceptionally harsh treatment there and tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. After several weeks of interrogation and torture, she was condemned to 10 years hard labour in a gulag as "Trotkyst spy and conspirator", whilst Becker was shot in front of a firing squad. Several of her long-time friends, amongst them Bertold Brecht tried to help her but to no avail. Neher was sent to Oryol, an internment camp for political dissidents where other prominent Trotkysts like Christian Rakovsky, Maria Spiridonova and Olga Kameneva were also imprisoned. Very few details are available about Carola Neher afterwards. As of March 1941, we know that she was still alive: A letter she sent to the orphanage, where her 7-year old son Georg had been sent, survived. In the letter she inquires about his health and whether he still remembered her. We also know that she was not one of the 160 prominent political prisoners shot in Oryol during the Stalin purges of September 1941. When the camp was occupied by the advancing German army in October 1941, all German citizens interned in Soviet gulags were handed over to the Gestapo. As a communist, Neher was then charged with High Treason and evacuated East. The convoy arrived in the town of Ilezk near Orienburg (present-day Kazakhstan) in June 1942, where she was interned in the local prison. Following an outbreak of typhus (the prison had no sanitary installations of any sort), the already weak 41-year old Carola Neher (prisoner number 59783) died there on 26th July 1942. Her body was buried in an unmarked mass grave. Her son George, became a music teacher and only found out about his parents' identity in 1975.
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Inge Landgut was born on 23 November 1922 in Berlin, Germany. She was an actress, known for M (1931), Emil and the Detectives (1931) and Hilfe, ich bin unsichtbar (1951). She was married to Werner Oelschlaeger. She died on 29 May 1986 in West Berlin, West Germany.- Actress
Ellen Widmann was born on 15 December 1894 in Biel, Switzerland. She was an actress, known for M (1931), Das Weyerhuus (1940) and Der letzte raum (1966). She was married to Adolf Manz and Herbert Kuchenbuch. She died on 22 October 1985 in Zurich, Switzerland.- Actress
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Magda Schneider was born on 17 May 1909 in Augsburg, Germany and a singer, stage and film actress. After her graduation at a monastery school, she studied stenography and office management at a business school, but also attended ballet lessons and art courses at the Augsburg School of Music. Six months later, she gave her stage debut as soubrette at the Gärtnerplatz- Theater in Munich and was discovered by Ernst Marischka, who offered her a role at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. After her film debut Boykott (1930), she was type casted as the simple girl, dreaming of a happy life in movies such as Zwei in einem Auto (1932) or Ein Mädel wirbelt durch die Welt (1934). In 1933, she got to know Wolf Albach-Retty, whom she married four years later. Their children Rosemarie (aka Romy Schneider) and Wolf-Dieter were born in 1938 and 1941, but they divorced in 1945. After World War II, she appeared on stage and screen again, but was better known as ambitious mother, who urged on the career of her daughter Romy. In the 1950s, she played her mother or aunt in several movies such as Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht (1953) or Sissi (1955). In the last years of her life, she had to bear the death of her grandson David in 1981 and her daughter Romy in 1982. She died on 30 July 1996 in Berchtesgaden, Germany.- Actress
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Louise Ullrich was born in Vienna, the daughter of a major in the Austro/Hungarian Army. She studied at the Kunstakademie, and, while still a teenager, was contracted for two years by the Wiener Volkstheater where she enjoyed her first success on the stage. In late 1932, Louise received an engagement from the Lessing Theater in Berlin to co-star opposite Werner Krauss in 'Rauhnacht'. During one of her performances she was spotted by actor and film-maker Luis Trenker who cast her in the leading role of Erika in Der Rebell (1932). While Louise was inevitably secondary to both star and scenery, the picture did provide a stepping stone to further opportunities. In the Max Ophüls-directed Playing at Love (1933) she had second billing behind established star Magda Schneider (mother of Romy) and the following year appeared in the title role of Erich Waschneck's Regine (1935).
Other prestigious films with budding star Louise were to come: Viktoria (1935), a romance based on a novel by Knut Hamsun; and Annelie (1941), a family movie which earned the film studio Ufa the then record sum of six and a half million Reichsmark and garnered Ullrich the Coppa Volpi award in Venice. Her films also established her as an actress of stature - not of the conventional leading lady variety, not particularly ornamental or even especially beautiful - but of the ideal 'girl next door' type: tomboyish, spirited, charming and witty. Alternatively -- as in 'Annelie' -- she would embody the archetypal mother figure (resonating significantly with wartime filmgoers) or a weak-willed , sad wife (as in the title role of Henrik Ibsen's Nora (1944)). Audiences and critics alike applauded her performances and Louis B. Mayer even offered her a contract at MGM in 1938 which Louise declined. Instead, she traveled to South America where she met her future husband, Count Wulf Dietrich zu Castell, director of Munich-Riem airport.
After the war, Louise Ullrich made a seamless transition to character roles, dividing her time between stage and screen. One of her notable film appearances during this time was as Cornelie in Harald Braun's Keepers of the Night (1949). Though she had misgivings about the maudlin sentimentality and melodramatics of the screenplay (stating in her autobiography that it wouldn't have mattered to her whether she got the part or not!), the critic Gunter Groll praised her performance as more mature and defined while always retaining her distinguishing genuine qualities. In the 1960's, she made a number of television appearances (including a series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in which she played a strong-willed grandmother) and in 1973 published her memoirs. Louise Ullrich spent most of her remaining years writing and painting. One of her last works was an Australian travel memoir, published in 1985. The popular actress died of cancer in January that year.- Actress
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Her father was a police lieutenant and imbued in her a military attitude to life. Marlene was known in school for her "bedroom eyes" and her first affairs were at this stage in her life - a professor at the school was terminated. She entered the cabaret scene in 1920s Germany, first as a spectator then as a cabaret singer. In 1923, she married and, although she and Rudolf Sieber lived together only 5 years, they remained married until his death. She was in over a dozen silent films in increasingly important roles. In 1929, she was seen in a Berlin cabaret by Josef von Sternberg and, after a screen test, captured the role of the cabaret singer in The Blue Angel (1930) (and became von Sternberg's lover). With the success of this film, von Sternberg immediately took her to Hollywood, introducing her to the world in Morocco (1930), and signing an agreement to produce all her films. A series of successes followed, and Marlene became the highest paid actress of her time, but her later films in the mid-part of the decade were critical and popular failures. She returned to Europe at the end of the decade, with a series of affairs with former leading men (she had a reputation of romancing her co-stars), as well as other prominent artistic figures. In 1939, an offer came to star with James Stewart in a western and, after initial hesitation, she accepted. The film was Destry Rides Again (1939) - the siren of film could also be a comedienne and a remarkable comeback was reality. She toured extensively for the allied effort in WW II (she had become a United States citizen) and, after the war, limited her cinematic life. But a new career as a singer and performer appeared, with reviews and shows in Las Vegas, touring theatricals, and even Broadway. New success was accompanied by a too close acquaintance with alcohol, until falls in her performance eventually resulted in a compound fracture of the leg. Although the last 13 years of her life were spent in seclusion in her apartment in Paris, with the last 12 years in bed, she had withdrawn only from public life and maintained active telephone and correspondence contact with friends and associates.- Dita Parlo was born on 4 September 1906 in Stettin, Pomerania, Germany [now Szczecin, Zachodniopomorskie, Poland]. She was an actress, known for The Grand Illusion (1937), L'Atalante (1934) and Melody of the Heart (1929). She was married to Frank Guetal. She died on 12 December 1971 in Courbevoie, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
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Lucie Mannheim was born on 30 April 1899 in Berlin, Germany. She was an actress and writer, known for The 39 Steps (1935), Der Ball (1931) and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). She was married to Marius Goring. She died on 18 July 1976 in Braunlage, Lower Saxony, Germany.- Nora Gregor was an operetta diva, stage and film actress. She made her debut in Graz, Austria, and from there went to the Volksbühne an das Raimund-Theater in Vienna. She also worked at the Reinhardt Bühne in Berlin. From 1930 to 1933 she lived in Hollywood and also in Berlin. She made her first silent movie in 1921 and her first talkie in 1930 (Olympia (1930)). In 1937 she worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna and emigrated to Switzerland, France and Chile, where she died in Vina del Mar.
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The enigmatic actress remains one of the most interesting figures in German film. Although she achieved stardom early in her career, the tragic Sybille Schmitz could never fit in with her surroundings. Too "alien looking" for Hollywood, Schmitz never migrated to America like her more glamorous peers and began losing roles in her native Germany as well due to her vaguely Semitic appearance and ties to the Jewish community. After the war, like many former UFA stars, Sybille was seen as a painful reminder of the Third Reich and she was once more displaced by the optimistic "new look" actresses. With acting being her sole reason to thrive, Sybille Schmitz began to drink heavily and rely on drugs as her career sank lower and lower. She finally committed suicide under mysterious circumstances on April 13, 1955, while being "cared for" by a corrupt lesbian doctor she was living with at the time of her death.- Born in 1916 as the eldest child of a German-Baltic aristocrat, Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Pauline Caecila von Meyendorff actually never planned to become a movie star. When the Russian Revolution broke out, the family escaped to Germany, where Irene's mother Elisabeth left her conservative husband with the children to live a very unconventional life in the theatre circles of Weimar/Thuringia. In the early 1930's Irene came to Berlin to work as a cutter in the UFA film studios of Babelsberg. As a breathtaking beautiful, ice-cold blond young woman she would have been the ideal star for Alfred Hitchcock movies. But these were the 1930's and she lived in Nazi Germany. When she was discovered for the screen, her debut was only a mediocre swashbuckler movie - which unexpectedly made her a star. Her best part maybe was the noble Hamburg Patrician daughter Octavia in Veit Harlan's Opfergang (1944). She never was a sympathizer of the Nazi system. Her first husband, Dr. Heinz Zahler, was a member of the Kreisau Circle, a group of religious motivated anti-Nazi-bourgeois. Her beauty attracted Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda, who got a harsh rebuff by her ("You would degrade me - and you would degrade yourself"). Joseph Goebbels's infamous nick name "Bock von Babelsberg" (the old horny goat of Babelsberg) was Irene's creation. After the war she only played minor parts in German films. In 1961 she met British actor James Robertson Justice, fell in love with him and left her second husband Pit Severin, a journalist from Hamburg, to follow James Robertson Justice to England. It was 1968 when she returned a last time to screen for a small part in the costume drama Mayerling (1968). She never was interested to continue her career. 8 years after James Robertson Justice's death in 1975, she met and later married philanthropist Keith Bromley. Even at the age of 70 she sailed to the Artic and the Orinoco River. On September 28, 2001, she died in Hampshire after a full, remarkable life.
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Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was born on December 28, 1925 in Ulm, Germany. In 1940, she began to study acting. Even before the fall of the Third Reich, she appeared in several films, but most of them were only released after the war. To avoid being raped by Soviet soldiers, she dressed like a young man and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. She escaped and returned to war-shattered Berlin, where she played her first parts on stage. The first German movie after World War II, Murderers Among Us (1946), made her a star. David O. Selznick invited her to Hollywood and offered her a contract--with two conditions: Hildegard Knef should change her name to Gilda Christian, and she should pretend to be Austrian instead of German. She refused both and returned to Germany. In 1951 she provoked one of the greatest scandals in German film history when she appeared naked in the film The Sinner (1951). The Roman Catholic Church protested vehemently against that film, but Hildegard just commented: "I can't understand all that tumult--five years after Auschwitz!"
With the support of her first husband, the American Kurt Hirsch, she tried a second time to launch a Hollywood career and changed her surname from Knef to Neff (Americans could not pronounce Knef), but the only worthwhile part she got was a supporting role in the Hemingway adaptation of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952). She became a leading lady in German, French, and British films. Finally, America offered her another chance, this time on the stage. She achieved a kind of stardom as Ninotchka in the very popular Broadway play "Silk Stockings".
In 1963 she began a new career as a singer, surprising audiences with her typical, deep, smoky voice and the fact that she wrote many of her own song lyrics. In 1970, she wrote the autobiographical bestseller "Der Geschenkte Gaul". She got sympathy from all over the world for her fight against cancer, which she defeated several times.
After the German reunification, Hildegarde Knef moved back to Berlin and died at age 76 of a lung infection on February 1, 2002.- Hannelore Schroth was born on 10 January 1922 in Berlin, Germany. She was an actress, known for The Captain from Köpenick (1956), Emil of Lonneberga (1971) and A Glass of Water (1958). She was married to Peter Köster, Hans Hass and Carl Raddatz. She died on 7 July 1987 in Munich, Bavaria, West Germany.