Happy Birthday, Romy Schneider! Revisiting the Star’s Enduring Style
Happy Birthday, Romy Schneider! Revisiting the Star’s Enduring Style
On this day in 1938, the actress Romy Schneider was born in Vienna. Best known for her turns as the youthful Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Sissi)—whose 19th-century reign spawned a trilogy of popular German films in the latter 1950s—and Marianne in La Piscine, Jacques Deray’s lusty 1969 melodrama, Schneider wooed audiences here and abroad with her heady mix of aristocratic poise and can’t-help-it sex appeal. As one Vogue editor put it in 1962: “[Schneider has] a kind of clean-lady beauty with carefully careless honey-brown hair, pale aquamarine eyes of intense clarity, forthright eyebrows, and the born ability to sit half-naked at the telephone without appearing too undressed.”
Born into a family of actors, Schneider’s first film, When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953), starred her mother, Magda, a Bavarian said to be Adolf Hitler’s favorite actress. (Schneider would later suspect that the two had engaged in an affair.) By 20, the successive releases of Sissi (1955), Sissi: The Young Empress (1956), and Sissi: Fateful Years of an Empress (1957) had made Schneider an international star, albeit one with more still to prove. As directors from Luchino Visconti to Orson Welles would eventually find, under the corsets, crinoline skirts, and costume jewelry was a brave and passionate performer so emotionally available on set, that she tended to fall in love with her costars. (The French actor Alain Delon, to whom Schneider was engaged for a time in the early ’60s, refers to her even now as the love of his life. And who can blame him?)
Zig-zagging between the United States, France, Italy, and Germany, Schneider was quick to eclipse the froth and frippery of Sissi with far bolder, more sophisticated projects—and a wardrobe to match. Whether stripped down for a day à la plage in 1972’s César and Rosalie (Schneider had a fabulous body: “a true bosom, unscrawny limbs, [and] the right swells in the right places,” per one fashion writer) or bundled up après-ski while on holiday in St. Moritz, she could be put-together without looking stiff and practical without seeming lazy. An unofficial Chanel brand ambassador (Coco was a friend), Schneider slipped into pearls and tweeds in Boccaccio ’70 (1962) as one might pajamas—and donned a series of sultry Yves Saint Laurent sheaths like second skins in Max and the Junkmen (1971).
Offscreen, life wasn’t nearly so simple. A lengthy struggle with alcoholism—exacerbated by the death of her son in 1981—would be attributed to Schneider’s death in 1982, at the age of 43. But before the camera, buttoned and zipped into those clothes, all was very well, indeed.
On what would have been her 80th birthday, a look back at Romy Schneider’s life and style.
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