Lilli Palmer – Not Allowed to be German
Lilli Palmer was
born Lilli Marie Peiser in Posen on May 24, 1914. Her father was Dr. Alfred
Peiser, a respected doctor and surgeon (his doctoral thesis supervisor was
Konrad Röntgen, no less), her mother, Rose Lissmann, had been a stage actress
before her marriage. Lilli had had a classical training for the stage, namely
with Ilka Grüning (a leading stage actress in Germany before 1933 and internationally
best known for her brief appearance as a refugee in Casablanca) and Lucie
Höflich, another stage household name, in Berlin. 1932 Lilli came out with her
debut at the Hessische Landestheater in Darmstadt. Because of their
Jewish parentage, in 1933, her parents sent Lilli and their other daughter
Irene (later to become the actress and singer Irene Prador) away and abroad.
They went to Paris and 1934 Lilli went to London, where she got her first
(tiny) film appearance in Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" in 1936.
In
the mid-1940s she arrived on Broadway and in Hollywood with then-husband Rex
Harrison, and was instantly transformed into an leading lady. She starred in
Broadway productions as Anne of a Thousand Days, The Four Poster, and Bell,
Book and Candle and in such films as Fritz Lang's 1946 production Cloak and
Dagger and the 1947 melodrama Body and Soul with John Garfield. Her best
Hollywood production was the film-version of The Four Poster (1952), in which
she co-starred, again, with Harrison and strongly showed what would become the
key to her following international success, namely worldliness and
sophistication, coupled with a bewitching sense of humour.
Returning to Europe in the 1950s,
she reinforced her reputation as a top international star, and from that time,
she alternated between European- and American-made films, including, but not
limited to, Mädchen in Uniform (1958), But Not for Me (1959), The Pleasure of
His Company (1961), The Counterfeit Traitor, Adorable Julia (both 1962),
Operation Crossbow (1965), Oedipus the King (1968), De Sade (1969), The Boys
From Brazil (1978), and her last film The Holcroft Covenant in 1985. Her witty,
insightful 1975 autobiography, "Change Lobsters and Dance," (in
German "Dicke Lilli—Gutes Kind" – Fat Lilli—Good Child) turned
out to be a bestseller. With subtle humour that didn't spare herself she told
the itinerary and getaway of a once much-chaperoned, now virtually homeless,
girl from an upper middle class family to the nightclubs of Paris, the film
studios of London and later, together with her English husband Rex Harrison, to
Hollywood's brazen demimonde. Only in a few brief asides she mentioned what
happened to her Jewish family who had remained in Germany, such as her beloved
aunt who jumped out of the window and to death when the Gestapo came for her,
and her account of the eerie feeling that got hold of her when she first
returned to her former fatherland is striking.
Lilli wasn't spared the dark side of the glamour. After a sex scandal, in which
starlet Carole Landis supposedly committed suicide because of her doomed love
of Lilli's husband Rex Harrison, their marriage deteriorated. About that, Lilli
wrote later in her biography: "What does one wear to the funeral of one's
husband's mistress?" Harrison, a notorious philanderer, had an affair
with British actress Kay Kendall and divorced Lilli to marry the terminally ill
Kendall with hopes of a re-marriage to Palmer after Kay's death, but that never
happened. He later decreed that after his death part of his ashes should be
spread on Lilli's grave and so it happened.
In
1958, Lilli married Argentinian actor-heartthrob Carlos Thompson, later to
become a serious writer, to whom she stayed married until her death and the marriage
was said to be inordinately happy. Thompson commited suicide in 1990,
supposedly because he couldn't get over the loss of his wife.
Lilli Palmer's last work was not in film but in the TV mini series "Peter
The Great" in 1986, where she starred together with, among others,
Maximilian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, Omar Sharif, Trevor Howard and Laurence
Olivier.
She died from cancer on 27th January that same year, aged 71. Life had been
kind to her, at least in one respect: Germany's most beautiful daughter remained
beautiful until the end.
The fatherland honoured her with a postage stamp. 
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