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  • Marlene Dietrich

  • The Life
  • By: Maria Riva
  • Narrated by: Christa Lewis
  • Length: 33 hrs and 32 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 rating)

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Marlene Dietrich cover art

Marlene Dietrich

By: Maria Riva
Narrated by: Christa Lewis
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Publisher's Summary

With intimate detail, author Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, the charismatic star of stage and screen whose career spanned much of the 20th century. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Schöneberg, Riva's biography introduces us to an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress whose own mother equated show business with a world of vagabonds and thieves.  

Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexual mystique, and wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She comes alive in these pages in all her incarnations: muse, collaborator, bona fide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother.   

During World War II, Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom. There were her artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noël Coward, and Cole Porter, as well as her heady romances. And in her final years, Dietrich would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend.
©2017 Maria Riva (P)2020 Tantor
Film & TV Entertainment & Celebrities Women
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The First Goddess of TV & her famous mother’s life journies.

Maria Riva, a beautiful woman who is the Wind Beneath her mother’s wings. Describes her life as her mothers daughter, with her mothers; and her own tales of living on her Marlene’s shadow, but is the reason her mother remained a success so much longer than most Starlets of the Golden Ages of Hollywood.
Maria’s story, compassion, love, devotion and heartache shines through in every word.

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