German singer and actress Marlene Dietrich was BOTD in 1901. Born in Berlin, she appeared in vaudeville before graduating to theatre and silent films in the hedonistic world of 1920s Weimar Berlin. Her breakthrough role as an amoral cabaret singer Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) made her a star in Germany, featuring what became her signature song Falling In Love Again. Dietrich followed von Sternberg to Hollywood, where she was hailed as the successor to film star Greta Garbo. Von Sternberg directed Dietrich in six films, including Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus and the Catherine the Great biopic The Scarlet Empress, carefully cultivating her image as an alluring femme fatale. In Morocco, she appeared in a man’s suit and top hat in a nightclub scene and kissed a woman, to the delight of the crowd and her onscreen love interest Gary Cooper. Dietrich married director Rudolf Siebel in 1923, with whom she had a daughter, the actress Maria Riva. Openly bisexual, she clocked up an astonishing number of lovers, including Cooper, Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Jimmy Stewart, Orson Welles, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, Jean Gabin, Frank Sinatra, George Bernard Shaw, Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, and famously bedded both John F. Kennedy and his father Joe. She was also part of Hollywood lesbian enclave “The Sewing Circle”, with lovers including Mercedes de Acosta, Dolores del Río and (possibly) Anna May Wong, and had extended affairs with Joe Carstairs and Édith Piaf. Rejecting offers from the Nazi Party to return to Germany, Dietrich renounced her German nationality and became an American citizen, undertaking extensive tours and fundraising in support of the Allied forces during World War Two. For her services to the war effort, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour. Her film career slowed after the war, despite vivid appearances in A Foreign Affair, Witness for the Prosecution, Judgment at Nuremberg and Touch of Evil. Much of her later career was spent performing her one-woman cabaret show, employing Burt Bacharach as her musical arranger and wearing custom-made rubber body suits to maintain a svelte silhouette. She became increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs, suffering serious injuries after falling off the stage while intoxicated. After breaking her leg in 1974, she stopped performing and became a recluse in her Paris apartment, though kept in contact with world leaders Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher by telephone. She lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of West and East Germany, making a brief final public appearance to celebrate the end of the Cold War. She died in 1992, aged 90. Amid numerous posthumous honours, she was made an honorary citizen of Berlin and had the main-belt asteroid 1010 Marlene named in her honour. Three weeks after Dietrich’s death, Riva published a damning memoir, describing her mother as a cold, manipulative narcissist who left her in the care of sexually abusive nannies. Now regarded as one of the greatest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, her legacy as a sex symbol was referenced in Suzanne Vegas’ song Marlene on the Wall, and shamelessly copied by Madonna in the music video for her hit song Vogue. She was played by Katja Flint in the 2000 German-language biopic Marlene. Numerous Hollywood projects to make a film of Dietrich’s life have been proposed since her death, without success.