The adjective "iconic" is tossed about rather lightly these days, but our Star of the Month for May formed a living definition of that word. Marlene Dietrich, in a career that spanned eight decades, moved from the cabarets and silent films of 1920s Berlin to international stardom in the movies of Josef von Sternberg and, finally, to a pinnacle of fame as a concert performer of immaculate glamour. Along the way she maintained her reputation as a shimmering beauty with sparkling wit as well as an often-compelling actress.

Our tribute to Dietrich offers a comprehensive look at her heyday in films of the 1930s, as well as a generous sampling of later movies.

She was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on December 27, 1901, in Schöneberg, Germany (now a district of Berlin). Her father was a police lieutenant, and her mother was the daughter of a successful watch merchant and clockmaker. Dietrich had an older sister, Elisabeth. Their father died of injuries sustained during World War I, and their mother remarried in 1916. Dietrich attended Berlin schools and had dreams of becoming a concert violinist until a wrist injury derailed that ambition. While still an adolescent, she combined parts of her first and middle names to call herself "Marlene."

Dietrich's first professional stage appearances were as a chorus girl in revues and vaudeville-style entertainments. She failed to pass an audition for impresario Max Reinhardt's drama academy but was cast as a chorus girl and bit player in some of his productions. She was rumored to have appeared in a German silent as early as 1919, but her official movie debut came in The Little Napoleon (1923).

She met assistant director Rudolf Sieber on the set of one of her films, and the two were married in 1924. Although she lived with him for only five years, Dietrich would remain married to Sieber until his death in 1976. The couple had one child, Maria Elisabeth Sieber, who would become known as actress/author Maria Riva.

Dietrich's beauty, "bedroom eyes" and self-possessed air continued to attract attention in silent films and stage appearances through the 1920s. Her breakthrough came in 1929, when she was spotted in a Berlin cabaret by von Sternberg, who cast her in the role of cabaret singer Lola Lola in his film The Blue Angel (1930). Emil Jannings stars as the respectable professor brought down by his infatuation with the beautiful and enigmatic performer.

The Blue Angel, Germany's first feature-length talkie, was a UFA/Paramount Pictures co-production that was shot in two versions - German and English. It made Dietrich an international star and provided her signature song, "Falling in Love Again." In von Sternberg, she found the mentor who would guide her career for the next several years and who, by all accounts, became one of her many lovers.

Von Sternberg, who was born in Vienna but emigrated to the U.S. with his family at age 14, had grown up in New York and had been directing American films since 1925. After The Blue Angel, he invited Dietrich to join him in Hollywood at Paramount Pictures, which developed plans to market Dietrich as its exotic answer to MGM's Greta Garbo. Over the period of the next six years, von Sternberg averaged one film per year starring his new muse. Film critic David Thomson called the collection "seven masterpieces, films that are still breathtakingly modern."

In addition to Lola Lola, Dietrich's roles for von Sternberg include another enigmatic cabaret singer, Amy Jolly, in Morocco (1930), opposite Gary Cooper; seductive spy Marie Kolverer in Dishonored (1931), costarring Victor McLaglen; notorious adventuress Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express (1932), with Clive Brook; conflicted wife Helen Faraday in Blonde Venus (1932), featuring Cary Grant; the Empress of Russia in The Scarlet Empress (1934), with John Davis Lodge; and femme fatale Concha Perez in The Devil Is a Woman (1935), featuring Lionel Atwill.

Morocco earned Dietrich her only Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Both Morocco and Shanghai Express brought nominations to von Sternberg as Best Director. Their earlier collaborations were commercially successful, with Shanghai Express becoming the highest-grossing picture of its year. But the final two films in the series, The Scarlett Empress and The Devil Is a Woman, were box-office disappointments - although both director and actress felt their final film together was one of their most artful; Dietrich herself thought she was at her most beautiful in it.

After The Devil Is a Woman, Paramount production head Ernst Lubitsch fired von Sternberg, effectively ending his career as a first-string Hollywood director. He would direct a few more films, but von Sternberg had to move from studio to studio, or even country to country, to find work.

Dietrich, meanwhile, became one of the highest-paid film stars with assignments including two loan-outs: to Selznick International Pictures for The Garden of Allah (1936), her first color film; and to British producer Alexander Korda for Knight Without Armour (1937), shot in England and costarring Robert Donat. She returned to Paramount for two romantic comedies: Desire (1936), directed by Frank Borzage and reuniting her with Gary Cooper; and Angel (1937), directed by Lubitsch.

But by 1938, Dietrich was ranked 126th in commercial appeal among big-name movie stars and was named by American film exhibitors as "box office poison," along with Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and others. When Angel flopped, Paramount bought out Dietrich's contract.

Meanwhile, Dietrich - who applied for U.S. citizenship in 1937 - turned down offers from the Third Reich to return to her homeland as a leading star of Nazi Germany. Throughout World War II, she would remain famously and fiercely loyal to the Allies, selling war bonds, performing for the troops and supporting German and French exiles. For her wartime efforts, she received several honors from the U.S., France, Belgium and Israel.

Dietrich made one of the great radical career decisions when she agreed to star as a bawdy saloon girl in the comedy Western Destry Rides Again (1939), opposite James Stewart as the nonviolent cowboy hero. Her willingness to let down her hair, perform barroom fights and kid her sex-goddess image endeared her to audiences and revived her career. Her song from the film "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have" became a hit for her on Decca Records. She would play similar roles in two movies opposite John Wayne, Seven Sinners (1940) and The Spoilers (1942).

Dietrich remained active onscreen through the 1940s in such films as Raoul Walsh's Manpower (1941), Mitchell Leisen's The Lady Is Willing (1942) and William Dieterle's Kismet (1944). In the 1946 French crime film Martin Roumagnac (1946, TCM premiere), she plays a femme fatale opposite Jean Gabin, marking the only time these real-life lovers performed together onscreen. Dietrich seems to enjoy herself in Leisen's Golden Earrings (1947), in which she plays an earthy, dark-haired Gypsy named Lydia; and Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair (1948), in which she plays an ex-Nazi chanteuse and has a couple of very effective numbers.

The 1950s were another productive decade for Dietrich. Her interesting film roles of that era include a flamboyant theater actress in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950), the sexy boss of an outlaw hideout in the Fritz Lang Western Rancho Notorious (1952), the glamorous fortune hunter in Samuel A. Taylor's The Monte Carlo Story (1956), a compelling turn as the character providing the major plot twist in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957), and a reprise of her Gypsy character in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).

Dietrich's only important film role of the '60s was the German military widow in Stanley Kramer's all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Her final film appearance came in David Hemmings' Just a Gigolo (1978), starring David Bowie. She only lent her voice to a documentary about her life, Marlene (1984), created by her friend Maximilian Schell.

Much of Dietrich's career in her later years was devoted to concert performances in major theatres worldwide in which she often dressed in daring "transparent" evening gowns or a top hat and tails to create a sexually fluid image. Rigorous costuming, makeup and lighting helped her create an aura of eternal youth. Burt Bacharach became Dietrich's musical director in the mid-1950s and helped her develop a highly theatrical one-woman show. She performed it in many venues including Las Vegas and Broadway, winning a special Tony award in 1968.

Dietrich stopped performing after she fell from a stage in Australia in 1975 and broke a thigh. She spent the final decade of her life as a recluse in her Paris apartment, although she maintained contact with family and friends through letters and telephone calls. She died of renal failure on May 6, 1992, at the age of 90. Her funeral in Paris drew some 1,500 mourners inside the church and thousands more outside. The officiating priest said that "She lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier."

by Roger Fristoe