Born Rosemarie Albach-Retty on September 23, 1938 in Vienna, Romy Schneider was the center of the stuffy German-Austrian film universe before she became a world star. She became famous as a teenager with Ernst Marischka’s “Sissi” trilogy, which she later found to be a “block and leg”. After an interlude in Hollywood, where she worked with Orson Welles, among others, she became a thoroughly French actress who wrote film history with films such as Claude Sautet’s “The Things of Life”.
She can do everything on screen – but nothing in life, she is often quoted as saying. Exulting, saddened to death. This is how she describes herself in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s TV documentary “Romy – Portrait of a Face”. She’s 25, she doesn’t get any more relaxed with age. Years later she admits: “I always have to go to the extreme, even if it’s not good.” There are many such frank quotes from Romy Schneider. Again and again she reveals herself, eager to show “her true face”.
Maybe someone should have protected her from herself. Nobody did. Not her family – her mother began a detailed series of articles in the Bild newspaper shortly after Romy’s death – and certainly not the media public, who apparently suffered, but above all did good business with her. At her funeral, the eulogies could hardly be heard because reporter helicopters were circling over the cemetery. Photos were even taken of her dead son in the hospital. The star, who earned particularly well from her, began a multi-part series with the hypocritical title “The Exploitation of Romy Schneider” a few months after her death.
In 1979, Romy Schneider shot the dystopian science fiction thriller “The Purchased Death”, which oppressively anticipated developments in the media. In it she plays a seriously ill woman whose death is witnessed live by television viewers. At the premiere, she spoke of personal concern: “You know how much a private photo of me, for example after a miscarriage, is traded in the press.”
Romy Schneider’s life story also tells of the public’s dealings with apparently public people. She must have died of a broken heart, the media suspected, after the prematurely shouted conclusion that Schneider had committed suicide was not confirmed. One may call some of this sympathy hypocritical. In fact, she had never been forgiven for going to Paris and starting a new life there, which had been considered German national property since “Sissi”.
The blows of fate she will suffer are always good for headlines. When, after five years of relationship, Alain Delon throws the succinct, now famous sentence “I went to Mexico with Nathalie” on a handwritten note, there is a hint of “We knew it”. “Romy without luck”, newspaper headlines. Unlike in France, in Austria and Germany the image of the broken woman with the broken life is cultivated. “The legend of the tragic Romy Schneider is told again and again, but that doesn’t make it any more accurate,” says her daughter Sarah Biasini. “Of course she experienced difficult breakups, her son died. But my mother was more than that. My mother didn’t just cry.”