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Romy Schneider

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Romy Schneider

Rosemarie Magdalena Albach (23 September 1938 – 29 May 1982), known professionally as Romy Schneider (German: [ˈʁoːmi ˈʃnaɪdɐ, ˈʁɔmi -] ), was a German and French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. She later reprised the role in a more mature version in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1973). She began her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. Coco Chanel called Romy "the ultimate incarnation of the ideal woman". Bertrand Tavernier remarked: "Sautet is talking about Mozart with regard to Romy. Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler..."

Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach in Vienna, six months after the Anschluss of Austria into the German Reich. She was born to a theatrical family; her father Wolf Albach-Retty was a leading actor of Vienna's Volkstheater, and her mother Magda Schneider starred in scores of lavish musical films in Germany. Her paternal grandmother Rosa Albach-Retty had been one of the most popular actresses of the Austrian theater. Rosemarie, known to family as Romy from her earliest years, was educated at private schools in Berchtesgaden and Salzburg. Interested in painting, she planned to continue her education at art school, but she was also interested in school plays, not only acting in them but directing as well.

Four weeks after her birth, her parents took her to Schönau am Königssee in Germany where she and later her brother Wolf-Dieter (born 1941) grew up with their grandparents Franz Xaver and Maria Schneider on the country estate Mariengrund. In her first year, Schneider was cared for by a governess. Her parents were very rarely present due to their acting engagements. In 1943, they separated and divorced in 1945.

In September 1944, Schneider was enrolled in the elementary school of Schönau and from July 1949 she attended the girls' boarding school at Castle Goldenstein [de], a private secondary school of the Augustinian Canonesses of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Elsbethen near Salzburg. During her schooldays, she discovered her passion for acting which is why she was often on stage at theatrical performances at the residential school. In her diary entry of 10 June 1952, she wrote: "If it were up to me, I would immediately become an actress. ... Every time I see a nice movie, my first thoughts are about the idea: I definitely have to become an actress. Yes! I have to!" On 12 July 1953, she left the residential school Goldenstein with the degree of Mittlere Reife. After the summer holidays, she moved to Cologne to join her mother who lived there with the restaurateur and entrepreneur Hans Herbert Blatzheim [de].

After her parents' divorce in 1945, Magda took charge of Schneider and her brother Wolf-Dieter, eventually supervising her career, often appearing alongside her daughter. Her career was also overseen by her stepfather Blatzheim who, Schneider said, had made sexual advances on her.

Schneider's first film, made when she was 15, was When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953), credited as Romy Schneider-Albach. In 1954, Schneider, for the first time, portrayed a royal, playing a young Queen Victoria in the Austrian film Mädchenjahre einer Königin (known in the U.S. as The Story of Vickie and in Britain as Victoria in Dover).

Schneider's breakthrough came with her portrayal of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the romantic biopic Sissi (1955) and its two sequels, Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) and Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress (1957), all with Karlheinz Böhm, who became a close friend. Less stereotypical films during this busy period include The Girl and the Legend (1957), working with a young Horst Buchholz, and Monpti (1957), directed by Helmut Käutner, again with Buchholz. In an attempt to work on a higher artistic level, she starred with Lilli Palmer in the 1958 remake of Mädchen in Uniform.

Schneider starred in Christine (1958), a remake of Max Ophüls's 1933 film Liebelei (in which her mother Magda Schneider had played the same role). It was during the filming of Christine that Schneider fell in love with French actor Alain Delon who co-starred in the film. She left West Germany to join him in Paris, and they announced their engagement in 1959.

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