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Marlene Dietrich
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Marlene Dietrich was a film actress and cabaret singer from Berlin who became a Hollywood star after starring in Josef von Sternberg's film The Blue Angel (1930). The film featured "Falling in Love Again (I Can't Help It"), a signature song she performed internationally until the 1970s. All angles and androgyny, she's been a sex symbol and fashion icon since she appeared in German films in the 1920s. As an actress she is best known for her roles in the von Sternberg movies Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934). In Hollywood her best-known roles were in the western comedy Destry Rides Again (1939, featuring her other well-known song, "The Boys in the Back Room"), the courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and the Orson Welles thriller Touch of Evil (1958). As a singer she was known for cabaret songs sung in a deep, sultry voice, for her support of U.S. troops during World War II and for her popularity in the 1950s in London and Las Vegas.
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The glamorous Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) is one of the most enduring female icons of the twentieth century. Singing, dancing, acting, and, most importantly, being her own mysterious self, the Berlin born star captivated the imagination of everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Jacques Chirac. What accounts for this matchless allure, that fascinated audiences from the 1920's through the 60's? The question has elicited numerous answers, many of them contradictory. Naturally, there are those who point to her slinky figure and aristocratic face as the primary components of her charm. But, there is much more to Marlene Dietrich than just a pretty picture.
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Marlene Dietrich apparently had a nominal Lutheran family background. But she essentially had no religion other than acting. Rudolf Sieber, her husband for 50 years, was Catholic. Marlene's mother was a very proper, Victorian, traditional German aristocratic woman, a virgin bride, well educated. Marlene Dietrich's birth name was Maria Magdalena.
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The most exotic actress of the 1930s and '40s, Marlene Dietrich performed her cabaret act around the world and recorded for Decca, Columbia and Capitol in the post-war period, after her film career had slowed. A thick German accent and her odd sung-spoken vocal style proved no barrier to international popular success and adoration. Born near Berlin in 1901, she began studying acting as a teenager, and auditioned with director Max Reinhardt several times before entering his drama school. She worked in the German theater and film world during the 1920s, gradually assuming star status until her international breakout at the end of the decade, when she appeared in The Blue Angel, directed by American Josef von Sternberg.
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Marlene Dietrich began acting in films in 1923, but it was her role as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel that catapulted her to fame in 1929. Deitrich's first American film, Morocco earned Dietrich her an Oscar nomination. Between 1930 and 1935 Marlene Dietrich starred in six films: Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman.
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Marlene Dietrich's enviable place in American films seems to be predicated on the fact that she began her career as arguably filmdom's first openly bisexual heroine. Certainly, during her pre-code tenure, she was often poured into masculine attire and seen kissing an equal portion of women and men on screen. However, with the installation of the production code for moral ethics in film making in 1934, much of that dangerously ambiguous allure evaporated -- or rather was reconstituted into a string of parts that had Dietrich playing temperamental hookers or loose married women with a heart of gold. Regardless of her early trailblazing days as a pioneer or liberator for the sexually repressed, this reviewer has personally never fully acquired a palpable taste for her particular brand of neutral sexuality. And now Universal Home Video offers yet another reason for social historians to poo-poo the actress on film -- or rather, DVD. Marlene Dietrich: The Glamour Collection effectively brings together 5 of Dietrich's flicks that for the most part should have remained ambiguously absent from home video.
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