Aptly, film director Billy Wilder defined her ‘a strange combination of the femme fatale, the German Hausfrau and Florence Nightingale’, for she aroused conflicting emotions from her many admirers. Marlene Dietrich, archetype of the enigmatic screen sex goddess, desirable yet unattainable, remains one of the most enduring of all Hollywood myths. Although the events of her earliest years were long shrouded in mystery (thanks first to the machinations of the Press on her arrival, in 1930, in the USA and later to her own unreliable memoirs) it is now proven that she was born Maria Magdalene Dietrich, in Schöneberg near Berlin, on December 27, 1901. As the younger of two daughters of Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, a severe and serious-minded Prussian police lieutenant and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing (a scion of Felsings, the prosperous Berlin jewellers) her upbringing was comfortable, conservative, upper-middle class, in spite of the premature demise of both her father and her step-father, cavalry lieutenant Edouard von Losch, who was killed on the Russian front during the closing stages of World War 1.

Brought up in the war-torn German capital, Maria inherited her love of the arts (and in particular her penchant for poetry and music) from her mother. As a teenager, she took up the violin (for a time she played in a cinema orchestra accompanying silent pictures) and had ambitions for a full-time career on the halls, until a wrist injury prompted a re-think that led her towards the theatre. Her first stage experience was as a dancer, in the chorus-line of a 1919 revue but by 1921 she aspired to an acting career and sought admission to the school of the legendary producer-director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943). She failed her first audition, but after further professional work in the chorus of a touring revue, was accepted the following year. By now already known as Marlene, until 1926 Marlene Dietrich played in stage dramas (ranging from Shakespeare to Shaw) and in film productions, including a substantial support role in 1923 in Tragedy of Love (selected for this by her future husband, the Czech production assistant Rudolf Seiber).