1. Hildegard Knef was billed in some English-language films as Hildegard Neff or Hildegarde Neff.
22 Facts About Hildegard Knef
1. 2.
Hildegard Knef left school at 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG.
3.
Hildegard Knef did appear in several films before the fall of Nazi Germany, but most were released only afterward.
4.
Hildegard Knef got a part in Marcel Pagnol's Marius, which was directed by Boleslaw Barlog.
5.
Hildegard Knef stated that she didn't understand the tumult that the film was creating.
6.
Hildegard Knef wrote that it was totally absurd that people considered her nudity to be scandalous, as Germany was the country that had created Auschwitz and had caused so much horror.
7.
Hildegard Knef's singing career started in the 1960s once her film career was not going very well.
8.
Hildegard Knef 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.
9.
Hildegard Knef appeared in the 1975 screen adaptation of the Hans Fallada novel, Every Man Dies Alone directed by Alfred Vohrer, released in English as Everyone Dies Alone in 1976, and for which she won an award for best actress at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary, then Czechoslovakia.
10.
Hildegard Knef was cast as Hilde in the Hollywood film Decision Before Dawn, directed by Anatole Litvak and co-starring with Richard Basehart and Oskar Werner in a story about the later part of World War II.
11.
Finally, in 1955, Hildegard Knef was offered a starring role in the Broadway musical Silk Stockings by Cole Porter, which was based on the 1939 film Ninotchka, which had starred Greta Garbo in the title role.
12.
Hildegard Knef had acted in at least 30 films in the United States and Europe, but her triumph came in New York when she played Ninotchka, an unemotional Soviet commissar.
13.
Hildegard Knef is known for her version of the songs "Ich hab noch einen Koffer in Berlin" and "Mackie Messer".
14.
Hildegard Knef sold more than three million records in total.
15.
Hildegard Knef launched 23 original albums which counted for 320 different songs.
16.
Hildegard Knef's autobiography Der geschenkte Gaul: Bericht aus einem Leben was a candid recount of her life in Germany during and after the Second World War, and reportedly became the best-selling German book in the post-war years.
17.
Hildegard Knef's second book Das Urteil was a moderate success, and dealt with her struggle with breast cancer.
18.
Rachel MacKenzie wrote that Hildegard Knef had her 56th operation, a mastectomy, in Salzburg on 10 August 1973.
19.
The book is divided in these two sections but they are not chronologically ordered because Hildegard Knef wrote the two sections in a way that the reader is moved forward and backward in time and space.
20.
Hildegard Knef had a daughter with him born in 1968, Christina Antonia.
21.
On 1 February 2002, Hildegard Knef died at the age of 76 of a lung infection in Berlin, where she had moved after the German reunification.
22.
Hildegard Knef smoked heavily for most of her life and suffered from emphysema.