Zarah
Leander (March 15, 1907 – June 23, 1981) was a
Swedish actress and singer. She was born as Zarah Stina
Hedberg in Karlstad, and died in Stockholm.
Although Zarah Leander studied piano
and violin already as a small child, and sang on stage
for the first time at the age of six, she made a serious
attempt at an ordinary life. As a teenager she lived
two years in Riga (1922–1924), learned the then
most important international language, German, took
up work as a secretary, married Nils Leander (1926),
and had two children (1927 & 1929). However, in
1929 she was engaged, as an amateur, in a touring
cabaret by the leading entertainer and producer Ernst
Rolf and for the first time sang "Vill ni se
en stjärna," ('Do you want to see a star?')
which soon would become her signature tune.
In 1930, she participated in four
cabarets in the capital, Stockholm, made her first
records, including a cover of Marlene Dietrich's "Falling
in Love Again," and played a part in a film.
However, it was as Hanna Glavari in Franz Lehár's
operetta The Merry Widow that she had her definitive
break-through (1931). By then she had divorced Nils
Leander. In the following years, she embarked on a
splendid career and could make a decent living as
a popular artist on stage and in film in Scandinavia.
Her fame brought her proposals also from the European
continent and from Hollywood, where a number of Swedish
actors and directors were working.
Zarah Leander opted for an international
career on the European continent. As a mother of two
school-age children, she ruled out a move to America.
In her view it was, most of all, too insecure. She
feared the consequences, should she bring the children
with her such a great distance and subsequently be
unable to find employment. Despite the political situation,
Austria and Nazi Germany were much closer, and Leander
was already well-versed in German.
A second breakthrough, by contemporary
measures her international debut, was the world premiere
(1936) of Axel an der Himmelstür at the Theater
an der Wien in Vienna, directed by Max Hansen. It
was a parody on Hollywood and not the least a parody
of the German Marlene Dietrich, who had fled a Europe
marked by Mussolini's, Stalin's and Hitler's stars.
It was followed by the Austrian film Premiere, in
which she played the role of a successful cabaret
star.
At the same time, she landed a contract
with UFA in Berlin, and became known as an extraordinarily
tough negotiator, demanding influence, high salaries
and half of it paid in Swedish currency to a bank
in Stockholm. A stupefied Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels dubbed her "Enemy of Germany",
but as a leading film star at UFA, she participated
in ten films, most of them great successes, and great
contributions to the Third Reich's propaganda, as
a counterweight to the international isolation and
criticism that not the least Swedish newspapers demonstrated.
However, unlike other film stars at the time, such
as Olga Chekhova, Leander neither socialized with
leading party members nor took part in official Nazi
party functions.
Zarah Leander played roles with, basically,
the same personality in all her German films; some
said she played herself. Her was the role of a femme
fatale, independently minded, beautiful, passionate
and self-confident. Many of her songs had a frivolous
undertext, or could at least be interpreted that way.
Her last film in Nazi Germany premiered on March 3,
1943. Her villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of
Grünewald was hit in an air raid, and the increasingly
desperate Nazis pressured her to apply for German
citizenship. At this point she decided to break her
contract with Ufa, leave Germany, and retreat to Sweden,
where she had bought a mansion at Lönö,
not far from Stockholm.
After the Wehrmacht's defeat in the
1943 Battle of Stalingrad, public opinion in Sweden,
the government of which remained officially neutral
throughout the war, nonetheless shifted towards criticism
of the Nazis, and people's sympathies were increasingly
pro-Allied and pro-American. Zarah Leander had been
far too extensively associated with Nazi propaganda,
and was shunned. But gradually she managed to land
engagements on the Swedish stage, and after the war
she did eventually return to tour Germany and Austria,
giving concerts and acting in musicals. But she would
never regain the popularity she had enjoyed before
and into the first years of World War II
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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