The legend of Marlene Dietrich

How to sum up the legend of Marlene Dietrich? She was an actor, a singer, a style icon, even a war hero. A retrospective is under way at the BFI, where more than a dozen of her films are being shown throughout this month. Many admirers saw only the shimmering legs and forgot the sharp intellect, the wartime gallantry. But it would be wrong to deny that body image was central to her success. It was with this in mind that the critic Robin Wood christened Dietrich ‘the Venus de Marlene’.

Like the statue alluded to, Dietrich is a monument of Western culture, her image cast not in stone, but in light (that marble of the modern world, made possible by the newly invented movie camera). It was a self-consciously androgynous image that would shape modern ideals of beauty as surely as the Venus de Milo did classical archetypes. And in the pantheon of screen goddesses, Dietrich alone gets to perch on Venus’s pedestal; no performer before or since has been so synonymous with pure eroticism.

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901, at the beginning of the century she would eventually become an emblem of. Unlike the streetwise strumpets she loved to play, Dietrich hailed from a cultivated bourgeois family. She was raised bilingually in German and French, excelled at reciting poetry — developing a lifelong passion for Goethe and Rilke — and studied violin at the conservatoire. That schooling was discernible in her performances; behind all the provocation lay her classical diction, her formal timbre.

As a teenager, she reinvented herself as Marlene (a portmanteau of her overly pious birth name) and apprenticed with Max Reinhardt, the theatre impresario whose high-kitsch style — spectacular stage lighting, elaborate costumes — later inspired her concert-hall presentation.