Maria Schell

Perhaps it’s the Baldinger in me, my maternal grandfather’s Swiss strain; or it’s a vestige of my paternal grandmother Eshbaugh’s German antecedents, but I have always had a thing for the Swiss/Austrian actress Maria Schell. 

I think I first fell for her when I saw her play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, and again as an immigrant woman in The Hanging Tree. She had the most extraordinary eyes that gazed out from the depths of a very old soul, and one of those complicated brows that seemed capable of registering any emotion. 

The clip shows snippets of her performing as Nora in a German production of A Doll’s House. But you don’t need to know German to scroll through and observe her extraordinary range as her character turns from a vapid hausfrau into a formidable human being. Had she been a tad younger, I think she would have been the only actress who could have played Zhivago’s Lara better than Julie Christie, and that’s saying something.

After a distinguished career in Europe (she fled Austria for Switzerland during World War II), she seemed off to a promising start in Hollywood. But, with the exception of Gary Cooper, whom she admired for being at all times so “sovereign,” as she put it, she didn’t like Americans much and returned to Austria just as her career was taking off.

Her entire family was theatrical, including her brother Maximilian. A short while before her death, he produced a strange documentary about her titled My Sister Maria, in which she was filmed as she languished, penniless, in the house she grew up in. It’s available on Netflix, and because she spent her old age watching her old movies, it boasts a number of clips of her performances. Hard as it is to reconcile her luminous youth with her decrepit old age, even in her late 70s she still had that deep, empathetic gaze and sorrowing smile that captivated me when I was a child.