Marlene Dietrich

During the 1930s and 1940s, Marlene Dietrich emerged as cinema’s most exotic leading lady, later sustaining her worldwide fame by taking a cabaret revue to stages across the globe and cutting records for Decca, Columbia and Capitol once her screen work diminished. Her pronounced German accent and distinctive sung-spoken delivery never hindered the global acclaim she continued to enjoy. Born near Berlin in 1901, she began acting lessons while still a teenager and, after several unsuccessful attempts, finally gained admission to Max Reinhardt’s drama school. Throughout the 1920s she steadily rose through the German stage and film ranks until her star-making turn in The Blue Angel, the late-decade feature helmed by American director Josef von Sternberg, propelled her to international attention.

That breakthrough quickly opened doors in Hollywood, where she ranked among the decade’s foremost female stars in vehicles such as Song of Songs, The Scarlet Empress, Knight Without Armour and Destry Rides Again. Although newly naturalized, the actress drew on her German roots to support the Allied cause, delivering the beloved “Lilli Marlene” during USO appearances and taping German-language anti-Nazi broadcasts. After the conflict she received both the Medal of Freedom and the title of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She had already made records in Germany by the late 1920s, yet it was not until the 1950s that she returned in earnest to the music industry, beginning with Decca before signing an extended contract with Columbia. The label issued numerous concert albums that captured her flamboyant cabaret performances in major European cities, several of them featuring a young Burt Bacharach as musical director.

Once her Columbia tenure ended, Dietrich moved to Capitol in the mid-1960s, only to withdraw from performing a decade later. She resurfaced briefly for a pair of screen appearances: the 1979 feature Just a Gigolo alongside David Bowie and the 1984 documentary Marlene, which relied on her voice alone without showing her on camera. Shortly after her death in 1992, a new stage musical drawn from her life, Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”), made its debut.