Romy Schneider, German-French actress (born 1938)

Rosemarie Magdalena Albach, known professionally as Romy Schneider, was a German and French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. She later reprised the role in a more mature version in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1973). She began her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. Coco Chanel called Romy "the ultimate incarnation of the ideal woman". Bertrand Tavernier remarked: "Sautet is talking about Mozart with regard to Romy. Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler..."