CHRISTINE KAUFMANN

(11 January 1945 - 28 March 2017)

The German actress was born in Austria but brought up in Munich where she trained in ballet and joined the Munich Opera as a dancer. She entered films in 1952 in a version of White Horse Inn and then made many more in Germany, including Mädchen in Uniform, the 1958 remake of the 1931 original, with Lilli Palmer and Romy Schneider. She then gained international recognition in 1959 opposite Steve Reeves in The Last Days of Pompeii. Later came Town Without Pity, filmed in Germany and Austria, with Kirk Douglas, for which she won the Golden Globe. She continued in German films until Taras Bulba in 1962, where she met and then married Tony Curtis, the first of her four husbands. She continued to be in demand mostly in European movie and TV productions and the occasional UK film such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, plus Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen and Percy Adlon’s Bagdad Café in 1987. Christine Kaufmann carried on making films, notching up over a hundred productions in her career. Her last film was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in 2014. She published two autobiographies and books on health and cosmetics, and had her own make-up brand.

MICHAEL DARVELL