Word: von
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Beethoven's Fidelio, Herbert von Karajan...
...stepfather was killed in World War I, and her hopes for a career as a violinist were ended by a hand injury. By 1929 she was making a career on the German stage and screen. It was then that another of this century's perpetual emigres, gifted, egomaniacal Josef von Sternberg, noticed the "cold disdain" with which she eyed the nonsense of a theatrical farce in which she was appearing. It was just the quality he was looking for in the leading lady of a film he had come to Berlin to make...
...faintly risible) story of the sadomasochistic relationship between a nightclub singer and a middle-aged high school teacher who becomes obsessed with her. The callousness of Lola-Lola's manipulations was memorable, but not more so than the soon-to-be-famous legs that walked all over her victim. Von Sternberg returned triumphantly to Hollywood, and Dietrich followed...
Paramount teamed them for six more pictures. But Von Sternberg was a Svengali who used his Trilby less as a performer than as another element in his lush decor -- and an androgynous one at that. It suited him to dress her in white tie and tails (and to have her kiss a woman before she embraced Gary Cooper in Morocco). At first Dietrich fit into Hollywood's pantheon of sexual ambiguity somewhere between Greta Garbo and Mae West. Von Sternberg did nothing to soften her exotic sexual challenge or penetrate her masklike countenance, both of which were largely his creations...
...Von Loesch suggests that the source of the cast's incompatibility rested in Marquette's inability to "realize what it meant to be involved in theater here, and the time commitment involved...she set limitations on the hours of rehearsal...