Marlene Dietrich

Lore & Background

Dietrich was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on 27 December 1901 at Leberstraße 65 in the neighborhood of Rote Insel in Schöneberg, now a district of Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine, was from an affluent Berlin family who owned a jewelry and clock-making firm. Her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant. Dietrich had one sibling, Elisabeth (5 February 1900 – 8 May 1973).

Dietrich's father died in June 1916, in the First World War. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic first lieutenant in the Grenadiers, then courted Wilhelmina and married her later in 1916, but he died in August 1917 from wounds sustained during the First World War. Von Losch never officially adopted the Dietrich sisters, so Dietrich's surname was never von Losch. Dietrich's family nicknamed her "Lena", "Lene", or "Leni".

Aged about 11, she combined her first two names to form the name "Marlene." Dietrich attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls' School from 1907 to 1917 and graduated from the Victoria-Luise-Schule in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1918. She studied the violin and became interested in theater and poetry as a teenager. A wrist injury curtailed her dreams of becoming a concert violinist, but by 1922 she had her first job playing violin in a pit orchestra for silent films at a Berlin cinema.

She was fired after four weeks. The earliest professional stage appearances by Dietrich were as a chorus girl on tour with Guido Thielscher's Girl-Kabarett vaudeville-style entertainments and in Rudolf Nelson revues in Berlin. In 1922, Dietrich auditioned unsuccessfully for theatrical director and impresario Max Reinhardt's drama academy; however, she soon found herself working in his theatres as a chorus girl and playing small roles in dramas. Dietrich's film debut was a small part in the film The Little Napoleon (1923).

Career beginnings

She met her future husband Rudolf Sieber on the set of Tragedy of Love in 1923. Dietrich and Sieber were married in a civil ceremony in Berlin on 17 May 1923. Her only child, daughter Maria Elisabeth Sieber, was born on 13 December 1924. Dietrich continued to work on stage and in film both in Berlin and Vienna throughout the 1920s.

Reader's Guide

In 1929, Dietrich landed her breakthrough role of Lola Lola, a cabaret singer who caused the downfall of a hitherto respectable schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings), in the UFA production of The Blue Angel (1930) shot at Babelsberg film studios. Josef von Sternberg directed the film and thereafter took credit for having "discovered" Dietrich. The film introduced Dietrich's signature song "Falling in Love Again", which she recorded for Electrola. She made further recordings in the 1930s for Polydor and Decca Records.

In 1930, on the strength of The Blue Angel's international success, and with encouragement and promotion from Josef von Sternberg, who was established in Hollywood, Dietrich moved to the United States under contract to Paramount Pictures, the U.S. film distributor of The Blue Angel. The studio sought to market Dietrich as a German answer to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Swedish star Greta Garbo. Sternberg welcomed her with gifts, including a green Rolls-Royce Phantom II. The car later appeared in their first U.S. film Morocco.

Dietrich starred in six films directed by von Sternberg at Paramount between 1930 and 1935. Von Sternberg worked effectively with Dietrich to create the image of a glamorous and mysterious femme fatale. He encouraged her to lose weight and coached her intensively as an actress.

She willingly followed his, sometimes imperious, direction. In Morocco (1930) with Gary Cooper, Dietrich was again cast as a cabaret singer. The film is best remembered for the sequence in which she performs a song dressed in a man's white tie and kisses another woman, both provocative for the era. The film earned Dietrich her only Academy Award nomination.

Morocco was followed by Dishonored (1931) with Victor McLaglen, a major success with Dietrich cast as a Mata Hari–like spy. Shanghai Express (1932) with Anna May Wong, which was dubbed by the critics "Grand Hotel on wheels", was another major success, earning $1.5 million in worldwide rentals. Dietrich and von Sternberg again collaborated on the romance Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant. Dietrich worked without von Sternberg for the first time in three years in the romantic drama Song of Songs (1933), playing a naïve German peasant, under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian.

Origins of a Discreet Code

The phrase 'sewing circle' emerged as a euphemism used from the silent era through the mid-twentieth century for informal networks of lesbian and bisexual women, primarily actresses, writers, and filmmakers, in Hollywood. Film and theatre sources credit actress-producer Alla Nazimova with coining or popularizing 'sewing circle' as discreet code for women who loved women in Hollywood's studio era; later accounts note the term's currency in circles around Marlene Dietrich. Sources emphasize it was not a formal club but a private, flexible network shaped by studio publicity, the Hays Code, and prevailing social mores. The term is discussed in film history and biography and has been used by curators framing scholarship on sapphic icons of early Hollywood.

Dietrich's Social World and the Circle's Membership

Marlene Dietrich is a figure frequently associated with the later usage and popularization of the term 'sewing circle.' The phrase is used by Marlene Dietrich herself to describe the group of lesbian and bisexual women writers and actresses, such as Mercedes de Acosta and Tallulah Bankhead, and their relationships in celebrity circles, particularly during Hollywood's Golden Age from the 1910s to the 1950s. Unlike de Acosta and Bankhead, most members of the Sewing Circle were closeted.

Ann Warner is cited in a popular history as a close companion of Dietrich. Claims of an affair between Dietrich and Claudette Colbert circulate. Scholarship and criticism discuss Dietrich's connection to the subculture and to queer screen/persona politics.

Scholarly Debates and Institutional Recognition

Axel Madsen's monograph popularized the term 'sewing circle' in the 1990s, prompting mainstream coverage and debate about evidence standards for studio-era private lives; reviewers noted the book's reach and cautioned against sensationalism, urging careful corroboration. Institutional usage includes the Academy Museum's 2024 screening series The Sewing Circle: Sapphic Icons of Early Hollywood. The term is discussed in film history and biography and has been used by curators framing scholarship on sapphic icons of early Hollywood.