Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris
Legend
The biography of the Bavarian princess Elisabeth, born in 1837, who later became empress of Austria-Hungary, shows astonishing parallels to that of Romy Schneider. Neither woman could accept the roles that they had to play in public during their lifetimes. Both lives were marked by strokes of fate: Elisabeth’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide in 1889 at the age of 30. Elisabeth, who had always suffered quite severely from the representational constraints connected to her position, hardly appeared at public occasions afterward, but instead retired to remote palaces and traveled throughout Europe. Contemporaries rhapsodized about Elisabeth’s beauty, but were equally attracted to her grace, charisma and the mysterious aura that surrounded the empress. Elisabeth was regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her time and as a trendsetter in fashion. The empress had already become a mythical figure during her lifetime; all the more so after an assassination attempt led to her death in Geneva in 1898. When the SISSI films came to the screen in 1955, 1956 and 1957, the kitschy, sweet film figure merged with the real empress and both in turn with Romy Schneider. The overlapping of the legends surrounding the two women and their common destinies of adoring trivialization and appropriation by fans seeking solace is reflected in the media’s marketing of them to this day.
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The exhibition
Photo: M. Stefanowski
LUDWIG, 1972
Romy Schneider with
fans, 1955
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