Marlene Dietrich

Dietrich's father was born on 26 August 1867 and died in August 1908.

Dietrich had one sibling, Elisabeth (5 February 1900 – 8 May 1973).

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

She was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on 27 December 1901 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 attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls' School from 1907 to 1917 and graduated from the Victoria-Luise-Schule (today Goethe-Gymnasium) in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1918.

She studied the violin and became interested in theater and poetry as a teenager.

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 family nicknamed her "Lena", "Lene", or "Leni".

Aged about 11, she combined her first two names to form the name "Marlene".

In 1920s Berlin, Dietrich performed on the stage and in silent films.

Dietrich continued to work on stage and in film both in Berlin and Vienna throughout the 1920s.

On stage, she had roles of varying importance in Frank Wedekind's Pandora's Box, William 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 in musicals and revues such as Broadway, Es Liegt in der Luft, and Zwei Krawatten, however, that she attracted the most attention.

By the late 1920s, Dietrich was also playing sizable parts on screen, including roles in Café Elektric (1927), I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (1928), and The Ship of Lost Souls (1929).

A wrist injury curtailed her dreams of becoming a concert violinist, but by 1922 she had her first job playing violin in a pit orchestra for silent films at a Berlin cinema.

She was fired after only four weeks.

The earliest professional stage appearances by Dietrich were as a chorus girl on tour with Guido Thielscher's Girl-Kabarett vaudeville-style entertainments and in Rudolf Nelson revues in Berlin.

In 1922, Dietrich auditioned unsuccessfully for theatrical director and impresario Max Reinhardt's drama academy; however, she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas.

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.

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), The Devil Is a Woman (1935).

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.

She made further recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records.

In 1930, on the strength of The Blue Angel's international success, and with encouragement and promotion from Josef von Sternberg, who was established in Hollywood, Dietrich moved to the United States under contract to Paramount Pictures, the U.S. film distributor of The Blue Angel.

The studio sought to market Dietrich as a German answer to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Swedish-born star Greta Garbo.

Sternberg welcomed her with gifts, including a green Rolls-Royce Phantom II.

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.