Marlene Dietrich filmography film appearance was as herself in the 1984 documentary, "Marlene". In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich as the ninth-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema. </div style="font-size: 95%"> </div style="font-size: 95%"> </div style="font-size: 95%"> Complete list of television appearances (excluding news footage): Marlene Dietrich filmography Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress. In the 1920s, she acted on the Berlin stage and in silent films, making her film debut in 1922. She was propelled to international fame by director Josef von Sternberg, who cast her as Lola-Lola in "The Blue Angel" (1930). The film's commercial success brought her a
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