Schneider, Romy

Romy Schneider, German-French actress, 1938-1982

Romy Schneider, born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach, was a German-French actress. She started her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. From 1955 to 1957, she played the central character of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Austrian "Sissi" trilogy, and later reprised the role in a more mature version in Visconti's "Ludwig". Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era, including five films by Claude Sauvet. Their first collaboration, "The Things of Life" ("Les choses de la vie", 1970) was a great success, and made Schneider an icon in France.