Christine Kaufmann

Christine Kaufmann was one of Germany's most beloved and successful actresses throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Lengdorf, Styria, Austria, to a French make-up artist and an officer in the German Luftwaffe, Kaufmann grew up in Munich, where she began her entertainment career at a young age. After getting her start as a ballerina with the Munich Opera, Kaufmann made her first film appearance at age 7 with a small part in "The White Horse Inn" (1952). She got her first big break in her home country with the starring role in "Rose-Girl Resli" (1954), before a string of international successes followed, including "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1959), alongside Steve Reeves, and perhaps her most well-known film, the Kirk Douglas drama "Town Without Pity" (1961). Kaufmann made even more headlines when she married Tony Curtis in 1963, at the tender age of 18. They had two children before divorcing in 1968. Kaufmann would go on to have three more marriages: TV director Achim Lenz (1974-1976), musician and actor Reno Eckstein (1979-1982), and artist Klaus Zey (1997-2011). Later in life, Kaufmann also admitted to having an affair with noted Hollywood lothario Warren Beatty. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Kaufmann continued to work in film, most notably on a number of pictures by the auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including "The Marriage of Maria Braun" (1972), "World on a Wire" (1973), and "Lola" (1981). She also launched a successful cosmetics line in Germany and released a number of books on health and beauty. Kaufmann's final onscreen role came in 2008, with an appearance on the long running German police procedural "Im Namen des Gesetzes" (RTL, 1994-2008). On March 28, 2017, Christine Kaufmann died in Munich, succumbing to leukemia. She was 72.