Marlene Dietrich

True Narcissist. Cheered the tv when she saw Yul Brynner on there announcing his lung cancer. Kept her daughter out of school because she just couldn't be bothered. Treated people like playthings, especially her husband and child.

No, but she's so mesmerizing it's hard to notice.

r1, I wasn't asking if she was a nice person. I was asking if she could act.

R1, did she have a beef with Yul?

They had a love affair that ended badly. She also had one with James Stewart and aborted his baby after he refused to stay with her. (It's in her daughter's autobiography.)

She also used pins to tighten her face - a do it yourself facelift. Sure sounded painful.

I'm not a good judge of acting talent. I enjoyed watching her - she had charisma, imo, but I've only seen her in a couple movies. For the time, she was exotic, very European and very sexual.

She was bisexual as well - I believe had an affair with Greta Garbo.

Thanks, R5. I don't know much about her nor her love affairs.

I did see one movie of hers, though, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. I thought she was really good and was surprised she didn't get an Oscar nod, especially since the film got six big nominations (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Sound, Editing).

I absolutely adore her on film, but she was never a great actress - like so many stars of the 30s, she always played the same role: Marlene Dietrich. She was mesmerizing in the role, but after repeated viewings it does wear thin, which is why by 1939 she was labelled "box office poison."

It was only when she began to parody her own persona, in "Destry Rides Again", that she proved she could be more than just a hypnotizing fashion plate.

As an actor, her range was limited, but within that range she was SUPERB. In "Witness" she's very good as the wife, but in her "other role" as the Cockney she is quite awful - even her old friend Billy Wilder couldn't help her because that piece of the role was out of her range.

Dietrich was certain she would win the Best Actress Oscar for Witness For the Prosecution. She was shocked not to be even nominated.

Although she was bisexual, the idea of gay male sex was repellent to her. Her daughter records her making all sorts of knee-jerk homophobic remarks. That makes her typical of people of her time but it's still somewhat surprising coming from a notorious libertine like Dietrich.

On the other hand, she was a dear friend of Noel Coward, one of the most famous openly gay men in the world. When Coward died she initially expressed disgust at the thought of his constant male companions, his lover and his secretary, inheriting his estate. Upon reflection she decided that they had doubtlessly earned any bequest they would receive.

She is not a great actress but her skill as a performer is on display in the recordings of her concert tours in the 1960s. She is not technically good but her emotionally expressive singing is stunningly effective. Sadly, she continued these tours into her seventies when she became a parody of herself.

[quote]Dietrich was certain she would win the Best Actress Oscar for Witness For the Prosecution. She was shocked not to be even nominated.

Was there a reason why she wasn't? Was she not liked by the Academy/Hollywood, or was it merely a case of too many contenders and she slipped through the cracks.

Some felt a nomination would expose the dual roles she played, which was supposed to be a major surprise. At the end of the film there is that request of the audience to not tell others of the ending.

But the dual role wasn't the big reveal. After all, the movie was a play first, and the film's ending is slightly different. In the play, Vole and his wife tell Wilfrid the truth after the trial and literally get away with murder. But in the film, after they confess to Wilfrid, Vole pulls one on his own wife and tells her he's leaving her for another woman, which causes her to shoot him dead.

BTW: Dietrich still got a Golden Globe nomination.

I think it was hard for people to recognize she could act--von Sternberg treated her mostly as an object with which to reflect light, and that's how most people remembered her.

R5, do you think we don't know that Dietrich was bisexual???

R11, they had to change the ending when they filmed the play because the Production Code was still in force. Characters in movies couldn't get away with murder unpunished. It was the same thing that mucked up the ending of The Bad Seed, only they handled it better in WFTP.

I think Garbo was an awful actress. Proof that blankness is crucial for film stardom, in that it allows people to project whatever they want on your image. Other than that face, she was a mass of stagey mannerisms and affectations. Really one of the first names that comes to mind when thinking of performers whose work just hasn't stood the test of time.

[quote] I think Garbo was an awful actress

Finally... While she was certainly an interesting silent film actress, Garbo was simply awful in anything done after 1929. Just about totally unwatchable.

FWIW, Dietrich may not of been in the pantheon, but she didn't stink up the screen either. In fact I thought she was quite effective in Touch of Evil.

Dietrich was a "manufactured" star, created by Josef von Sternberg. She wasn't what you could call a "great actress" but she was very good in some of the movies she was in. My favorite performance of hers was in "Touch of Evil."

"While she was certainly an interesting silent film actress, Garbo was simply awful in anything done after 1929. Just about totally unwatchable."

What bullshit. Most film historians would disagree with the idiotic assumption that Garbo "was "awful in anything done after 1929." I guess you think she was ugly, too.

R15, you're nuts.

Garbo is perfect in CAMILLE. Her performance is still considered the best Marguerite ever. She was great in many other films. Luminous star.

I think R15 has a point about Garbo. It's not that she is forgotten or that she never made any good movies. It's simply that the work of many of her fellow film stars seems to resonate more with modern audiences than hers does. For example, Garbo was a bigger star than Crawford, but more people today seem to prefer Crawford. Garbo was considered exotic in her own time. Add eighty years to that, and exotic simply becomes alien.

Actually, r19, you're nuts.

Have you noticed the awful slouching she does in EVERY PICTURE? It's as if someone told her she was too tall and she's overcompensating. She was also not terribly graceful with those gigantic feet of hers (which even at the time were parodied in cartoons). Again, a beautiful face, but not so good an actress, despite what "historians" and old fangays say.

I was a neighbor when she was "living" rue d'Alésia in Paris. From my bedroom I could see the rear windows of her apartment. There were some heavy curtains and I never saw them move. Ever. One day we learned that she had died and that was it.

The curtains were taken down a couple of months later and normal people started to live there: as in people who would let the sun in their apartment.

r21 believes there's a critical equation between shoe size and acting ability.

Pauline Kael on Garbo in "Camille" (1937):

[quote]Like parents crowing over Baby's first steps, M-G-M announced "Garbo talks!" (for Anna Christie") and "Garbo laughs!" (for Ninotchka), but they missed out on this one, for which should have crowed, "Garbo acts!" Under George Cukor's direction, she gives a warm yet ironic performance that is possibly her finest.

[quote]Garbo was a bigger star than Crawford, but more people today seem to prefer Crawford.

People prefer Joan for all the wrong reasons: because they make fun of her and her awful acting and movies about 50 year old woman in love affair with young studs. Her ridiculous eyebrows. She's pure camp nonsense. That's why they like her...not as a serious actress but as an aging drag queen.

[quote]Have you noticed the awful slouching she does in EVERY PICTURE? It's as if someone told her she was too tall and she's overcompensating. She was also not terribly graceful with those gigantic feet of hers

WTF does this have to do with her acting? Are you Joan Rivers? People actually luv the way Garbo moved and has been a point of inspiration for some actresses. It was part of her charm. Her entrance in GRAND HOTEL is one of the greatest ever because she's so damn glamorous, tall and stunning.

RE: Crawford's Stardom

Yes, she does seem to still be big today. There was a time say the '80s. Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, James Dean were up - closer to Marilyn (no surname needed). They've since fallen in public estimation and popularity it seems. I'm no fan, but Monroe is still bigger than ever. And it seems so is Crawford.

[quote]It's not that she is forgotten or that she never made any good movies. It's simply that the work of many of her fellow film stars seems to resonate more with modern audiences than hers does. For example, Garbo was a bigger star than Crawford, but more people today seem to prefer Crawford. Garbo was considered exotic in her own time. Add eighty years to that, and exotic simply becomes alien.

Yes, I think that sums it up. I wonder what it is? I love Miss Crawford. I'm one of her biggest fans! Bias aside she really does still seem to have an audience today that Garbo doesn't.

Is it MOMMIE DEAREST? Garbo's exotic-now-odd style? Anti-intellectual America's newfound desire for "reliability" (see: Jennifer Lawrence)

Or was Miss Crawford simply always the bigger star? Garbo got the prestige, recognition, respect - Crawford actually but butts in seats in theaters.

It's interesting. Any thoughts?

R26, Crawford's popularity today tends to come by way of MOMMIE DEAREST; in fact, it's Faye Dunaway's histrionic and over-the-top portrayal that gays love to impersonate, with such quotes as "NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!!! EVER!!!" and "Christina, bring me the ax!" to name but a few.

Dietrich had performance skills that went through the roof. Given the right material, she just stomps all over any most performers.

See below: "Black Market"

I like Dietrich. I'll take a Dietrich film over one with Garbo anytime ! In so many of her films, Garbo came across awkward as though she didn't really want to even be in whatever movie she was making.

GRAND HOTEL ? Downright painful performances by near everyone in it. Crawford & old Lewis Stone came off best. Both Barrymore brothers & Garbo overacted.

Garbo ? "No, Flix........? How sweet ? (And) How do you live ?"

Garbo's persona has gone out of style, but she was THE great romantic actress/glamour queen for many, many years.

It's should be more interesting to try and figure out what she had, instead of being immediately dismissive because her style doesn't meet contemporary tastes.

[quote]The curtains were taken down a couple of months later and normal people started to live there: as in people who would let the sun in their apartment.

People so normal that no one would ever try to spy on them or photograph them through their back windows, no doubt.

James, kindly remove my buckets of piss.

I met Miss Dietrich when I was a totally un-sophisticated, 19 y.o twit. She was kind and sweet - believe it or not - and took time to make me feel special.

Oh yes - she performed beautifully at the concert that night. I enjoyed her in films, but she was limited by the directors vision of what she could/should do. (R33)

[quote] What bullshit. Most film historians would disagree with the idiotic assumption that Garbo "was "awful in anything done after 1929." I guess you think she was ugly, too.

Speaking of film historians, didn't Louis Brooks complain to Kevin Brownlow about Garbo's awkward, ungainly gait?

There's no disputing that Garbo was quite beautiful when young - breathtakingly so in Joyless Street.

So I'll be more polite: as with Vivian Leigh's latter performances, let's say her acting technique simply went out of style. It also didn't help that by her mid 30s (Two Faced Woman - 1941), she lost her allure and was becoming a bit matronly. Contrast that with Dietrich, who was in her mid 50s and still quite beautiful - in fact hot - in Touch of Evil.

She was DIETRICH so what else mattered? Her Sternberg films were perfection

[quote]and took time to make me feel special.

Yes, she loved giving blowjobs.

Apart from her marvelous face Dietrich was best known for her legs. In the end they betrayed her. She had poor circulation in her legs and she lost sensation in them. As a result she sometimes tottered when she walked.

Once as an elderly woman in concert Marlene leaned forward to introduce her conductor. She lost her balance and toppled into the orchestra pit, leading to the cancellations of several shows as she recuperated. She blamed the conductor for the fall, claiming he dragged her off the stage as she offered him her hand.

The poor conductor rushed to assure her relatives that he had not even touched her, let alone dragged her into the pit. She fell in all by herself before anyone could prevent it. Her family assured him that they suspected this was the case.

They knew that Dietrich was such a narcissist that she would never own her own failures. Her stubborn insistence on parading about in industrial strength drag while barely able to walk had caught up with her. But she wasn't about to admit defeat.

"Speaking of film historians, didn't Louis Brooks complain to Kevin Brownlow about Garbo's awkward, ungainly gait?"

"Louis Brooks?" Are you sure you don't mean LOUISE Brooks?

Louise Brooks was a silent film star briefly. She had a stunningly photogenic face, and a very specific "look" with her severely bobbed black hair. She'd been a Denishawn dancer and a Ziegfield Follies girl. Her figure wasn't so great, despite being a dancer; she was short and pear-shaped, with wide hips and chunky thighs and no tits.

Brooks was an alcoholic and incredibly capricious and irresponsible. When a film she had done required her to re-record some dialogue she refused to do it, cemeting her reputation for being uncooperative. American movie studios lost interest in her. The German film direction G.W. Pabst put her in two of his films. She was perfect as Lulu in Pabst's "Pandora's Box" because she WAS Lulu; a seemingly mindless tart who does nothing but drink, dance and screw around. Pabst wanted to make her into a serious actress, but she would have none of it and went on her self-destructive way.

Many down and out years later Brooks reinvented herself as a writer. She wrote about two things: herself and the movies. Her movie commentary was praised by some, condemned by others. Seems a lot of what she wrote wasn't particularly truthful. I don't remember what she wrote about Garbo. But you have to take everything Louise Brooks said with a grain of salt. Despite attempting to pass herself off as a "purveyor of truth (yes, she actually referred to herself as such)", she was really full of shit.

Garbo had average size feet. The rumor about her having huge feet was just gossip. I suppose people wanted to find a flaw in her. But big feet? That's grasping at straws.

Garbo's shoe size was 8.

Average today but not in the 1920s when she became a star and Gloria Swanson wore a size 4 and Joan Crawford a size 6.

Dietrich recognized the importance of costuming as well as makeup, hair and lighting and became a self-styled expert of each craft.

She was known to spend hours standing in costume fittings for her next film after a long day of shooting her current one. Her Paramount costume designer Travis Banton would supply the fitting room with a complete bar, knowing it would be the only way he could survive Dietrich's demands, though he admitted it was worth it in the end as she always looked ravishing in all those early von Sternberg films he designed.

Garbo, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less about costumes.

Though she was always costumed spectacularly by Adrian in all of her MGM films, when she retired in 1941 after the failure of Two-Faced Woman, she reputedly told him: "You know, I never really liked any of those clothes you put me in."

But Adrian recognized Garbo's retirement as the end of film glamour as he knew it and also retired from the movies in 1941, opening his own fashion line in an exclusive Beverly Hills salon.

Garbo's feet were ALWAYS listed as size 9. Huge then, huge now.

They used to say that Dietrich was Garbo but with a sense of humor, ironic, her being German and all.

But it's kind of true.

Dietrich seems like she's in on the joke, and Garbo wants to be left alone to brood.

'Garbo's feet were ALWAYS listed as size 9. Huge then, huge now.'

Bullshit. This is from Barry Paris's very good biography of Garbo:

Those folkloric feet were, in fact, a perfectly median length for a woman of her size: Garbo's shoe size was 7AA, according to no less reliable a source than Salvatore Ferragamo, the well-heeled cobbler who made seventy pairs for her in later years. "Garbo's feet were beautifully shaped and long, in correct proportion to her height," testified David Niven, a yachting friend of later years who had many occasions for first-hand observation, "but she had an unfortunate habit of encasing them in huge brown loafers that gave the impression she wore landing craft."

[quote]Garbo's feet were ALWAYS listed as size 9. Huge then, huge now.

On what planet is women's shoe size 9 huge? Maye on a 5 foot tall woman.

Kate Winslet has big feet (size 11).

The average women's shoe size in the US is size 8.

[quote] Her Sternberg films were perfection

I don't agree. They are all worth seeing, but they're not "perfection."

The first two she did with him, "The Blue Angel" and "Morocco," are phenomenal, and are really worth trumpeting. And there's loads to like in "Dishonored." But the other are not so good. 'Blonde Venus" is infamous for the "Hot Voodoo" number (where Dietrich appears on stage in a gorilla suit and emerges from it), but that's the only good thing in the whole movie. "The Scarlet Empress" and "The Devil is a Woman" are insane. They're like formal exercises in how to photograph her face when other things are put between her and the camera lens (smoke, lace, confetti, streamers, candle flames, ribbons, netting, etc.).

Marlene was famously outspoken against Hitler and the Nazis, and she was popular for selling war American war bonds and did other patriotic American things along with American-born stars during the 2nd World War. She mostly played a character glamorous and manufactured around her beauty, with variations the way Cary Grant was usually Cary Grant, though he was a better actor. Another later very good role is in "A Foreign Affair" with Jean Arthur, as well as the aforementioned "Witness for the Prosecution". Her singing was kind of problematic, as she had style but not much of a voice.

[quote] I think Garbo was an awful actress. Proof that blankness is crucial for film stardom, in that it allows people to project whatever they want on your image. Other than that face, she was a mass of stagey mannerisms and affectations.

Precisely.

In Grand Hotel you can compare her directly against Joan Crawford. Joan knocks Garbo right off the screen. I love the movie but fast forward though her scenes.

While I agree that Dietrich is best at playing variations of herself, check her out in [italic]Knight Without Armor[/italic] (1937). She and costar Robert Donat have great chemistry together-- he has a cool restrained sort of sexiness that contrasts beautifully with Marlene, who is less vampy and more vulnerable and human than usual. The movie is fantastic. Highly recommend watching next time it airs on TCM.

I agree.

I can’t tell these two apart.

Was Garbo a great actress though? I agree that she is totally iconic, but I've seen Queen Christina, Camille, and Ann Karenina and she was the same in all three. Flat emotion and dead pan delivery.