Hildegarde Neff

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Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef (28 December 1925 – 1 February 2002) was a German actress, singer, and writer. She was billed in some English language films as Hildegard Neff or Hildegarde Neff.


Hildegard Knef was born in Ulm. Her parents were Hans Theodor and Friede Augustine Knef. Her father, who was a decorated First World War veteran, died of syphilis when she was only six months. Then her mother moved to Berlin and worked in a factory.[1] Knef began studying acting at the age of 14, in 1940. She left school at 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG. After she had a successful screen test, she went to the State Film School at Babelsberg, Berlin, where she studied acting, ballet and elocution. Josef Goebbels, who was Hitler's propaganda minister, wrote to her and asked to meet her, but Knef's friends wanted her to stay away from him.[1]

Knef appeared in several films before the fall of the Third Reich, but most were released only afterward. During the Battle of Berlin, Knef dressed as a soldier in order to stay with her lover Ewald von Demandowsky, and joined him in the defence of Schmargendorf.[2] The Soviets captured her and sent her to a prison camp.[3] Her fellow prisoners helped her to escape and return to Berlin.

Von Demandowsky was executed by the Russians on October 7, 1946, but before that, he secured for Knef the protection of the well-known character actor Viktor de Kowa in Berlin. De Kowa gave her the opportunity to be a mistress of ceremonies in the theatre that he had opened. Knef also got a part in Marcel Pagnol's "Marius," which was directed by Boleslaw Barlog and proved one of the German theatre's great plays. De Kowa also directed Knef in other plays by Shakespeare, Pagnol, and George Abbott.[1]

Her two best known film roles were "Susanne Wallner" in Wolfgang Staudte's film Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), produced in 1946 by the East German state film company, and the first film released after the Second World War in East Germany; and "Marina" in Die Sünderin (The Sinner), in which she performed a brief nude scene, the first in German film history, which caused a scandal in 1950.

[4] The film was also criticised by the Catholic Church, which protested against the nude scene. Knef stated that she didn't understand the tumult that the film was creating.[5] She wrote that it was totally absurd that people reacted in that manner and made a scandal because of her nudity as Germany was a country that had created Auschwitz and had caused so much horror. She also wrote, "I had the scandal, the producers got the money." [1]

She performed in many films. In 1948, she received the award for best actress from the Locarno Film Festival because of her role in the film Film Without a Title. Her successful career as a singer started in the 1960s once her film career was not going very well. She wrote some songs by herself. She performed in television shows such as in episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and in a 2000 documentary in which she was playing by herself Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song.[6]

In the 1960s, she appeared in a number of such low-budget films as The Lost Continent.
She appeared in the 1975 screen adaptation of the Hans Fallada novel, Every Man Dies Alone directed by Alfred Vohrer,[7] released in English as Everyone Dies Alone in 1976,[8] and for which she won an award for best actress at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary,[9][3] then Czechoslovakia.
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