Romy Schneider Biography

Name:Romy Schneider
Date of Birth:September 23, 1938
Place of Birth:Vienna, Austria


Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach-Retty on September 23, 1938, in Vienna, Austria, and during her early years "Romy" became the shortened version of her given name. Romy Schneider was the third generation in a theatrical family on the side of her father, Wolf Albach-Retty, who regularly appeared with the Vienna Volkstheater. Romy Schneider paternal grandmother, Rosa Albach-Retty, had been a famous Vienna stage actress of an earlier era. Schneider's mother, meanwhile, was a film actress in Germany during in the 1930s, appearing in the light comedies and toothless historical epics that were part of the Nazi government's propaganda effort. During World War II, Schneider's parents separated, and after the age of four she lived with her mother and maternal grandparents in Berchtesgaden, Germany, where she attended school.

As a teen, Schneider attended a school in Salzburg, Austria, where she performed in plays and participated in several sports. Romy Schneider ambition was to become a painter, a career idea she jettisoned after her film career was suddenly launched at the age of 15. A director of one of her mother's films offered a part playing the on-screen daughter, and Wenn der weisse Flieder wieder blüht (When the White Lilacs Bloom Again) was a box-office success in 1953. Schneider was offered more parts, including a light biopic about the adolescence of Queen Victoria, Mädchenjahre einer Königen (Girlhood of a Queen).

Beloved "Sissi"Mädchenjahre einer Königen was written and directed by veteran Austrian filmmaker Ernst Marischka, and its success led to Schneider being cast in 1955's Sissi, the first in a trilogy of films about Elisabeth, the wife of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef. The film was a huge success in West Germany and Austria at the time and was quickly followed by two sequels that chronicled the beloved princess's 1854 wedding and subsequently tragic personal life. The trilogy's popularity seemed linked to some lingering post-World War II unease in West Germany, maintained critic Ute Schneider. "Hardly any other 1950s tearjerker film had been more effective in letting the audience sob their heart out," she wrote, according to an essay in the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. "It is a pertinent example of the continuing repression of political reality that can be traced in [German] entertainment cinema. Sissi demonstrated yet again the victory of the heart over the 'evil' of politics, the dream of conquering people and countries with no more than a feminine smile and maternal care."