A biography of Germany's Marlene Dietrich who became a respected film actress, a beloved USO performer, and a highly popular cabaret star.

A collection of the icon’s surprising and heartfelt thoughts on topics A-to-Z, plus recipes and photos—a wonderfully addictive scrapbook for fans. From the wonderfully varied and witty mind of Marlene Dietrich comes an alphabetized collection of her most zany, honest, and heartfelt thoughts. Offering her take on a range of ideas, people, and items, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC is an unprecedented glimpse into one of history’s brightest and most enigmatic stars. Nothing is too small or grand for Dietrich’s unique eye. From her entry for hardware store—“I’d rather go to a hardware store than to the opera”—to her entry for egocentric—“If he is a creative artist, forgive him”—she transforms both the mundane and the mysterious into snapshots of her own spirit. Complete with photos from her vast career, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC is an unexpected and addicting treat.

DIVA fascinating self-portrait of one of the greatest entertainers of Hollywood’s golden age /divDIV Film star. Cabaret sensation. Recording artist. Writer. Marlene Dietrich was nothing short of enchanting—and remains so as she chronicles her fabulous rise to stardom in Marlene. From her early career in Germany as a chorus girl to her breakout role as Lola in The Blue Angel to her courageous wartime tours, Dietrich recounts a life that captivates on the page just as she smoldered on the screen. She writes passionately of her friends—including Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Edith Piaf, among many others—and she shares memories of what she calls her greatest accomplishment: entertaining the Allied troops during World War II. A sustained expression of her bold, sophisticated style, Marlene reminds us why Dietrich remains an international icon and a true Hollywood legend. /div

In Marlene, the legendary Hollywood icon is vividly brought to life, based on a series of conversations with the star herself and with others who knew her well. In the mid-1970s Charlotte Chandler spoke with Marlene Dietrich in Dietrich’s Paris apartment. The star’s career was all but over, but she agreed to meet because Chandler hadn’t known Dietrich earlier, “when I was young and very beautiful.” Dietrich may have been retired, but her appearance and her celebrity—her famous mystique—were as important to her as ever. Marlene Dietrich’s life is one of the most fabulous in Hollywood history. She began her career in her native Berlin as a model, then a stage and screen actress during the silent era, becoming a star with the international success The Blue Angel. Then, under the watchful eye of the director of that film, her mentor Josef von Sternberg, she came to America and became one of the brightest stars in Hollywood. She made a series of acclaimed pictures—Morocco, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Destry Rides Again, among many others—that propelled her to international stardom. With the outbreak of World War II, the fiercely anti-Nazi Dietrich became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops on the front lines. After the war she embarked on a new career as a stage performer, and with her young music director, the gifted Burt Bacharach—whom Chandler interviewed for the book—Dietrich had an outstanding second career. Dietrich spoke candidly with Chandler about her unconventional private life: although she never divorced her husband, Rudi Sieber, she had numerous well-publicized affairs with his knowledge (and he had a longtime mistress with her approval). By the late 1970s, plagued by accidents, Dietrich had become a virtual recluse in her Paris apartment, communicating with the outside world almost entirely by telephone Marlene Dietrich lived an extraordinary life, and Marlene relies extensively on the star’s own words to reveal how intriguing and fascinating that life really was.

The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the landmark biography that tells the full-scale, riveting, and untold story of Marlene Dietrich. Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich’s childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves. Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality—wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She would play vulgarity but not become in; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat. As Riva herself remembers, “At age three, I knew quite definitely that I didn’t have a mother, I belonged to a queen.” Marlene Dietrich comes alive in these pages in all of her incarnations: as muse, artistic collaborator, bonafide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother. Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom. There were her rich artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward and Cole Porter, and her heady romances. In her final years, she would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend. Maria Riva’s biography of her mother has the depth, range, and resonance of a novel and captures the conviction and passion of its remarkable subject.

The approved biography of film star Marlene Dietrich, derived from a series of interviews with the author. It is illustrated with rare photographs.