BIRTH | Marlene Dietrich, Dec 27

Marlene Dietrich

December 27, 2019–This day was born in 1901 the film actress and cabaret singer Marlene (originally named Marie Magdalene) Dietrich, in Berlin.

Her family called her “Lena”. Her father, Louis Otto Dietrich, was a former military officer who became a police lieutenant under the Kaiser. Her widowed mother married her husband’s best friend, Eduard von Losch, who was killed in World War I.

Lena Dietrich and her older sister Liesel were tutored at home in Germany, learning French, English, ballet, violin and piano. They attended the Augusta Victoria School for Girls. Lena also took up playing the mandolin.

When an injury precluded her pursuing a musical career, Dietrich pursued an acting career. continued acting in a diverse range of small roles before American director Josef von Sternberg discovered her in 1929 and put her in his famed film, The Blue Angel (1930), as Lola-Lola, the seductive cabaret singer in a top hat and silk stockings over whom a professor becomes obsessed.

Dietrich was appalled by what was happening in her beloved Germany in the 1930s and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937. Adolf Hitler approached her and offered her a lavish income to return   to Berlin. She refused and Hitler banned her films and burned all copies of The Blue Angel, except for one he kept for himself.

In the United States, she spent time at the North Shore resort of Asharoken on Long Island (between Northport and Fort Salonga). It is where Antoine de Saint-Exupéry stayed on vacations, self-exiled, during the war years when he was writing The Little Prince. Eugene O'Neill was another artist who stayed there.

She decided to join the U.S. war effort, recording anti-Nazi broadcasts in German and taking part in war-bond drives. She entertained half a million Allied troops across North Africa and Western Europe. The troops loved her. She slept in dugouts and played a musical saw. Of her war efforts, she said, “This is the only important work I’ve ever done.”