7 Impressive Facts About Marlene Dietrich

American film debuts don’t get much more memorable than Marlene Dietrich’s. After appearing in several German silent films in the late 1920s, Dietrich was lured to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures, whose executives were looking for a star to rival MGM’s Greta Garbo. Dietrich made her U.S. debut in 1930 with Morocco, a film that saw her wear a tuxedo and top hat, kiss a woman onscreen, and somehow march off into the desert dunes in impossibly high heels. Dietrich received an Oscar nomination for her performance and went on to become a Hollywood sensation, starring in some of the most memorable movies of the 1930s.

When her film career faltered, she reinvented herself as a globetrotting cabaret performer, commanding fees as high as $30,000 for a single week. She was a fashion trailblazer, an LGBTQ+ icon, and a tireless humanitarian who could credibly add “helped defeat Hitler” to her resume. Here are seven impressive facts about one of the women who showed us what it meant to be a movie star. 

Marlene Dietrich’s first job was playing violin in a pit orchestra that accompanied silent films.

Dietrich was a gifted musician, learning to play the lute, piano, and violin during her childhood in Germany. (She once showed up outside the home of German silent film star Henny Porten and serenaded her.) When Dietrich was 20 years old, she was hired by a prominent Berlin conductor to play first chair violin in an orchestra that accompanied silent films. According to Steven Bach’s 1992 biography Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, the conductor thought Dietrich was a talented violinist, but fired her after a few weeks because “her legs proved too much of a distraction to other members” of the otherwise all-male orchestra. 

Dietrich failed her first audition for drama school.

Dietrich was working as a chorus girl in Berlin cabarets in 1922 when she set her sights on training at Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt’s renowned drama school. Her audition, which included a passage from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Death and the Fool, failed to impress the school’s examiners, and Dietrich was rejected. She found her way into the school anyway by appealing to famed cabaret performer Rosa Valetti, who saw potential in Dietrich and helped set her up with private lessons with a school administrator. 

A Nazi Party official tried to lure her back to Germany to make films for the Third Reich. 

By 1935, Dietrich had starred in several German silent films and become a bona fide movie star in America, having appeared in six Paramount productions. Nazi official Joachim von Ribbentrop approached her in 1937 to ask her to return to Germany to star in Nazi propaganda films [PDF], and Hitler reportedly wanted Dietrich to be his mistress. She rebuffed both offers, opting instead to call Hitler “an idiot” in interviews, apply for American citizenship, and throw herself into the Allied war effort. Dietrich renounced her German citizenship in 1939, the year she became an American citizen. 

Dietrich was recruited by the U.S. government to make devastating anti-Nazi propaganda.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the CIA, waged psychological war on Germany in hopes that it could “weaken the morale of Nazi troops,” according to USO.org. To this end, the OSS’s Morale Operations Branch recruited Dietrich and other stars to record songs that would be broadcast all over Europe on stations such as Soldatensender, or “Soldiers’ Radio.” Dietrich’s rendition of a wistful German love song called “Lili Marlene,” about a young man separated from his girlfriend after being drafted into the German army, became hugely popular with German troops. “Such songs could easily dampen the morale of the most steadfast soldier,” stated a 2008 article on the CIA’s website, “which is exactly what they were meant to do.” The article went on to say that “the programs were just as devastating to German morale as an air raid.”

She garnered a number of honors for her efforts to defeat Hitler’s Nazis.

Dietrich’s role in WWII didn’t end with her OSS work. The actress volunteered for the USO in 1944 and ’45, entertaining troops in France, Italy, Germany, and Algeria. According to the National Women’s History Museum, Dietrich “performed without power, slept in tents, and worked very close to the frontline.” (Ever the versatile musician, one of her most popular bits was playing the saw.) She was also a hugely effective proponent of war bonds, helping the U.S. government raise more than $1 million. 

Her work didn’t go unrecognized. The National Woman’s History Museum reports that France named Dietrich a “daughter of the Seventy-first Infantry Regiment of the army” in 1945 and later made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, while Belgium made her a Knight of the Order of Leopold. In 1947 she received the Medal of Freedom, the U.S.’s highest civilian decoration.

Dietrich was one of the highest-paid movie stars of her time.

Dietrich was reportedly paid $450,000 for her work in 1937’s Knight Without Armor—an amount equivalent to more than $10 million in today’s currency. 

Paris’s chief of police threatened to have her arrested if she wore pants in his city—so she arrived in head-to-toe menswear.   

In 1933, Dietrich was photographed on the deck of the SS Europa as it sailed to France. In the now-famous photo, the actress is reclining on a lounger in an immaculately tailored white pantsuit. The photo caused a stir when it appeared in French papers, and the head of the Paris police department warned that, due to an 18th century law forbidding women from wearing men’s clothing, Dietrich would be arrested if she wore trousers in his city. Dietrich being Dietrich, she pointedly arrived in Paris wearing a dashing men’s suit and beret. The police chief did not make good on his threat, and the actress was gracious about the incident; she later attended the Paris police’s annual charity event hosted by the chief’s wife. 

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