Renate Muller

Her film career began in 1929 when actor and director Reinhold Schünzel hired her for her first movie, and he used her again many times in his best films. She became a star of light, sexy comedies, reminiscent of American contemporaries Claudette Colbert and Nancy Carroll. Pert, stylish, and wholesomely pretty, she had just enough edge to make her impish sexuality more interesting. Her breakthrough role came in The Office Girl (1931), and she achieved wider fame with Victor and Victoria (1933), the popular romantic story of a woman who disguises herself as a man.

In the mid-1930s, the industry became acutely affected by the rise of Hitler. Unlike Marlene Dietrich, who turned her back on Germany and became a U.S. citizen, Renate stayed in her homeland despite her intense dislike of the bleak political situation. She became less cooperative over the years, especially when the regime began putting her in propaganda films such as Togger (1937). Renate died tragically at age 31 on October 7, 1937, after checking into a Berlin hospital for knee surgery. She apparently fell or was pushed out of a third-story window and died instantly. Some sources say it was suicide due to her desperate unhappiness; others insist it was murder covered up by the fascist regime. They claim her death resulted from her lack of cooperation, her clandestine involvement with a Jewish man, and the regime's fear that she would leave Germany. According to Uwe Klöckner-Draga's book, Goebbels wrote in his diary that he helped her, and her sister Gabriele said Renate was drunk and lost her balance on a window sill. Her death was deeply felt, and her fans were not allowed to attend her funeral.