Marlene Dietrich

Who was Marlene Dietrich?

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German-born American actress and singer.

Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as "Lola-Lola" in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest-paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a U.S. citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of all time.

Famous Quotes:

• Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
• The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.
• Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.
• Until they come to see us from their planet, I wait patiently. I hear them saying: Don't call us, we'll call you.
• Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.
• There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich.
• Gentleman. A man who buys two of the same morning paper from the doorman of his favorite nightclub when he leaves with his girl.
• A new kind of award has been added -- the deathbed award. It is not an award of any kind. Either the recipient has not acted at all, or was not nominated, or did not win the award the last few times around. It is intended to relieve the guilty conscience of the Academy members and save face in front of the public. The Academy has the horrible taste to have a star, choking with emotion, present this deathbed award so that there can be no doubt in anybody's mind why the award is so hurriedly given. Lucky is the actor who is too sick to watch the proceedings on television.
• Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is the bullring.
• To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.