Brigitte Helm (born Brigitte Gisela Eva Schittenhelm, 17 March 1908 – 11 June 1996) was a German actress, best remembered for her dual role as Maria and her double, the Maschinenmensch, in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis.

Brigitte Gisela Eva Schittenhelm was born on 17 March 1908 in Berlin, the daughter of Gretchen Gertrud Martha Schittenhelm (née Tews; 1877–1955) and merchant Edwin Alexander Johannes Schittenhelm (1871–1913).^{[citation needed]}

Helm attended school at the Johannaheim [de], an orphanage for girls with an attached school, founded by the entrepreneur Eduard Arnhold, located at the old customs station Werftpfuhl in Hirschfelde (now Werneuchen-Hirschfelde, Brandenburg). She took an interest in acting as a child, and by the age of twelve was taking the lead in school plays.

At the age of sixteen, convinced of her talent, she wrote to Fritz Lang as she wanted to become a film actress. In Neubabelsberg, she played Elizabeth in Mary Stuart for Lang. Impressed by her choice of the role of Elizabeth, her "mobile expression", and her improvisational skills, he recommended her to UFA, through which Helm received training. After an unsuccessful audition with another director, Lang decided, despite numerous reservations, to cast her in the dual role of Maria/the Maschinenmensch in his film Metropolis. She began work on Metropolis while only 17 years old. She signed a ten-year contract with UFA in 1925.

After Metropolis, Helm made over 30 other films, and played almost exclusively leading roles. To avoid being typecast as a femme fatale, she sued UFA, reached a settlement, and subsequently took on other roles as well. In 1930, she filmed her first sound film, The Singing City. Since it was common practice at the time to produce sound films in different language versions, she also appeared in the French and English versions of her successful German films. Her other appearances include The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), Alraune (1928), L'Argent (1928), Gloria (1931), The Blue Danube (1932), L'Atlantide (1932) and Gold (1934). Helm was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) before Elsa Lanchester was given the role.

In 1935, she filmed An Ideal Husband for Terra Film; this was her last film. Despite efforts by UFA, Helm withdrew from the film industry due to disagreements with the Nazi regime.

Helm was involved in several traffic accidents, and was briefly imprisoned. According to the Nazi Party's Press Chief Obergruppenführer Otto Dietrich's book, The Hitler I Knew, Adolf Hitler saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped.

Helm married Rudolf Weissbach in 1928, but she divorced him in 1934. She married her second husband, industrialist Dr. Hugo Eduard Kunheim, with whom she had four children, after her film contract expired in 1935. Because her second husband was of Jewish descent, in 1935 she moved with him to Switzerland, where they had four children. She never returned to the film industry.