Marlene Dietrich well as George Bernard Shaw's "Back to Methuselah" and "Misalliance". It was in musicals and revues such as "Broadway", "Es Liegt in der Luft", and "Zwei Krawatten", however, that she attracted the most attention. By the late 1920s, Dietrich was also playing sizable parts on screen, including roles in "Café Elektric" (1927), "I Kiss Your Hand, Madame" (1928), and "The Ship of Lost Souls" (1929). In 1929, Dietrich landed the breakthrough role of Lola Lola, a cabaret singer who caused the downfall of a hitherto respectable schoolmaster (played by Emil Jannings), in the UFA production of "The Blue Angel" (1930),
Marlene Dietrich time, she was a prolific letter-writer and phone-caller. Her autobiography "" ("Take Just My Life"), was published in 1979. In 1982, Dietrich agreed to participate in a documentary film about her life, "Marlene" (1984), but refused to be filmed. The film's director, Maximilian Schell, was allowed only to record her voice. He used his interviews with her as the basis for the film, set to a collage of film clips from her career. The final film won several European film prizes and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary in 1984. "Newsweek" named it "a unique film, perhaps the