Magda Schneider

Magdalena Maria Schneider (17 May 1909 – 30 July 1996) was a German actress and singer. She was the mother of the actress Romy Schneider. Biography Magdalena Maria Schneider was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, the daughter of a plumber. She attended a Catholic girls' school and a commercial college; thereafter she worked as a stenographer in a grain store. At the same time, Schneider studied singing at the Leopold Mozart Conservatory in Augsburg and ballet at the municipal theater. She made her stage debut at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich. Schneider drew the attention of the Austrian director Ernst Marischka who called her to the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, and in 1930 gave Schneider her first film role. While filming in 1933, Schneider met her future husband, the Austrian actor Wolf Albach-Retty. The couple married in 1937 and had two children: Rosemarie Magdalena, called Romy, and Wolf-Dieter, later a surgeon, born in 1941. During World War II, Schneider lived in the Bavarian Alps near Hitler's retreat in the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden. Schneider was a guest of Hitler's, who declared that she was his favorite actress. Later she and Albach-Retty separated and the marriage ended in divorce in 1945. After the war, offers for movies initially were few. Schneider again began filming in 1948 and promoted her daughter's career with the joint appearance in the film When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (1953) directed by Hans Deppe, a typical 1950s Heimatfilm which was the film debut of her daughter, 14-year-old Romy Schneider. In the same year Magda Schneider married the Cologne restaurant owner .