Marie 'Marlene' Dietrich

             Marie ‘Marlene’ Dietrich was a German-born American actress and singer born in 1901 in what is now part of Berlin. Her early life was far from perfect, as her father died when she was young, followed by her adoptive father, who died during World War I. Despite these sorrows Dietrich was interested in violin, theater, and poetry, and soon found herself working for Max Reinhardt as a chorus girl. Dietrich worked her way up from there, eventually making her way into film with The Little Napoleon and later attracting the attention of director Josef von Sternberg. It is with Sternberg that Dietrich landed her breakout role, playing the character ‘Lola Lola’ in the 1929 film The Blue Angel.

Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, the first feature length German ‘talkie’, featured Dietrich as a cabaret singer who seduces and eventually brings to ruin a teacher at a local school. Featuring Dietrich in scandalous clothing, the film included scenes of her straddling objects, lifting her legs into the air, and undressing, all unabashedly vulgar when compared to the films produced after the 1934 production code went into effect. Dietrich’s character aligns most closely with the Hollywood formula’s ‘vamp’ type, but The Blue Angel doesn’t feature the happy-ending familiar plot in which the heroic schoolteacher turns down the affections of Dietrich, instead it shows Dietrich’s character wreaking havoc on the schoolteacher’s life, seemingly punishing him for his sexual indulgence and lapse of judgement, and (spoiler alert) ending with his death.

Dietrich’s performance in The Blue Angel won her a contract with Paramount Pictures, and she went on to star in several Hollywood films, many of which were also directed by Sternberg. One of the highest paid actresses of this time, Dietrich successfully lobbied her ‘exotic’ looks and reprised her role as a cabaret singer in Morocco, a film that earned her an Academy Award nomination, in which she scandalously kissed another woman on screen. Dietrich’s popularity and commercial success fell in the late thirties, likely a direct result of the 1934 production code seeing as her most successful films often saw her playing the part of a sexualized femme fatale. Despite this fall from fortune Dietrich declined contracts to work for the Nazi party in Germany, and like many of Hollywood’s greatest contributors, applied for U.S. citizenship. Dietrich’s career continued until the late seventies, and she died in 1992 at age 90.

(Fun Fact: Marilyn Monroe dressed up as Dietrich’s character from The Blue Angel)