Sybille Schmitz

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Sybille Schmitz
Sybille Schmitz c. 1930
Born
Sybille Maria Christina Schmitz

(1909-12-02)2 December 1909
Düren, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
Died13 April 1955(1955-04-13) (aged 45)
Munich, Bavaria, West Germany
OccupationActress
SpouseHarald G. Petersson

Sybille Maria Christina Schmitz (2 December 1909 – 13 April 1955) was a German

actress
.

Biography

Schmitz attended an acting school in

Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), and eventually F.P.1 (1932), where she played her first leading role.[1]

Schmitz established herself as a prominent actress in the German cinema with the films which followed including

Reichsfilmkammer and had a strenuous relationship with Joseph Goebbels. However, her explicitly non-Aryan appearance relegated her mostly to femme-fatales
or problematic foreign women.

After

Third Reich, and it became difficult for her to land roles. She appeared in supporting roles in such movies as Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947), Sensation in Savoy (1950), and Illusion in a Minor Key
(1952), but was beset with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, several suicide attempts and the committal to a psychiatric clinic. Her self-destructive behavior and numerous affairs with both men and women further alienated Schmitz from the film industry and her husband, screenwriter Harald G. Petersson.

Coincidentally, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (1953's The House on the Coast, now considered a lost film) had Schmitz's character dying by suicide as a last act of desperation. A much earlier film, Frank Wisbar's The Unknown (1936) ends with the suicide of Schmitz's character, also in a final act of desperate hopelessness.

Death

On 13 April 1955, Schmitz died by suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills;[2] she was 45 years old. At the time of her death, she had been living in Munich with a woman named Ursula Moritz, a physician who allegedly sold her morphine at an inflated rate and kept Schmitz doped up while squandering the little funds she had available to her. Schmitz's family claimed that once the actress proved to be of no more use to Moritz, the physician facilitated her suicide. One year after Schmitz's death, charges were filed against Dr. Moritz for improper medical treatment.

Legacy

Schmitz's final years were used as the basis for

Ufa-Star
Sybille Schmitz (English: Dance with Death: The Ufa Star Sybille Schmitz), written and directed by Achim Podak.

Both the documentary and the Fassbinder film are available on the Criterion DVD release of Veronika Voss. A ghostly vampire featured in one of the Vampire Hunter D novels is named Sybille Schmitz, a reference to Schmitz's role in Vampyr.

Partial filmography

Literature

  • Brigitte Tast, Hans-Jürgen Tast: Dem Licht, dem Schatten so nah. Aus dem Leben der Sybille Schmitz, Kulleraugen – Visuelle Kommunikation Nr. 46, Schellerten 2015,
    ISBN 978-3888420467

References

  1. ^ "Sybille Schmitz". IMDb. Retrieved 2021-04-28.
  2. ISBN 978-0472069736
    .

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sybille_Schmitz&oldid=1215771563"