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Hildegard Knef (1925-2002) |
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- Cornell Borchers, The Big Lift, 1949. Head Fox Darryl Zanuck insisted she change her name to Gilda Christian and her roots from German to Austrian. Knef refused. He still prepared this US debut for her - opposite Montgomery Clift! And sacked her on hearing of her affair with an SS officer during WWII. In fact, Ewal von Demandowsky, worked under Goebbels as head of the #2 German film comany, Tobis Filmkunst. (He was executed in 1946 and rehabilitated in the 1990s by the Russian Federation). Knef dressed as a soldier to fight alongside him, in the Battle of Berlin, was captured, sent to a POW camp – and escaped back to the Berlin stage. And her German replacement was suddenly… Lithuanian
- Gloria Grahame, Man on a Tightrope, 1952. Zanuck interfered again after New York director Elia Kazan booked her for his circus troupe making a daring escape to Germany from the Communist Czechoslovakia. Knef was switched to the sultrier Grahame.
- Cyd Charisse, Silk Stockings, 1956. Next she was asked to repeat her Broadway triumph in the musical version of Garbo’s Ninotchka, 1938, when she was replaced by Charisse. A far better dancer to be sure, but the role wasn’t just song ’n’ dance.
- Mai Zetterling, Seven Waves Away (US : Abandon Ship), 1956. A movie to out-suspense Alfred Hitchcock’s similar Lifeboat, 1943. When the German star refused Tyrone Power’s offer to join his first and only completed starring project for his Copa Productions - his fiancee became the UK’s favourite Swedish star. And Power’s… For Christmas week that year, Power and Zetterling shot an UK TVersion of Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
- Nadja Tiller, Du rififi chez les femmes (US: Riff Raff Girls), France-Italy, 1959. She was interested when the veteran ace, Marcel Carné, was due to direct. The female gangster Vicky de Berlin was rather younger when realisateur Alex Joffé took over.
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