The enigmatic actress remains one of the most interesting figures in German film. Although she achieved stardom early in her career, the tragic Sybille Schmitz could never fit in with her surroundings. Too "alien looking" for Hollywood, Schmitz never migrated to America like her more glamorous peers and began losing roles in her native Germany as ...
Usually played mysterious women with tragic backstories.
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Her brooding large eyes.
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Quote
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I want to sleep. Forever.
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Fact
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The last years of Sybille Schmitz were used as basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movie "Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss".
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After the war demanding roles nearly stopped for the expressive Sybille Schmitz. She appeared among others in the movies "Zwischen gestern und morgen" (1947), "Sensation im Savoy" (1950) and "Illusion in Moll" (1952), but her way back to the anonymity she repressed with drugs. It followed depressions and several attempted suicides, finally the committal to a psychiatric clinic.
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The actress Sybille Schmitz attended an acting school in Cologne and got her first engagement at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1927.
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She became completely poor and committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. One year later there was brought an action against her lady doctor because of improper medical treatment.
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Sybille Schmitz was married with the screenwriter Harald G. Petersson. The marriage broke up when Sybille Schmitz had a love affair with the theater chief Beate von Molo.
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While never officially "blacklisted" by the Nazi regime, filmmakers were discouraged from casting her in lead roles, which were by the end of the 1930s occupied by new blonde and blue eyed stars of the Third Reich. Sybille ended up being typecast as a femme-fatale or a tempting foreign woman.
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Her tragic life after the end of World War II - struggling to get roles, drug addiction, suicide - inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder to his acclaimed film Veronika Voss (1982).
$7 Million
