Date of Birth

22 August 1902, Berlin, Germany

Date of Death

8 September 2003, Pöcking, Starnberg, Bavaria, Germany

Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.

Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine.

Robert von Dassanowsky considers Tiefland (1954) to be Riefenstahl's cinematic statement on her rejection of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

In early 2000, the 97 year old Riefensthal spent several weeks recovering in hospital after suffering broken ribs and lung injuries after being involved in a helicopter crash whilst filming in Sudan.

She says she read Ernest Hemingway's "Green Hills of Africa" (1935) in 1955 and prepared immediately to visit the Sudan, which she did the following year, was accepted by and lived with the Nuba people for several months. She wrote three books, mainly photographic essays documenting the vanishing beauty of African people and cultures, from 1972 to 1997. Those are possibly her best refutations of accusations of her racist philosophy as the director of Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations (1938).

Ms. Riefenstahl lied about her age in 1973 to be passed an official licence to go deep-diving in the Pacific Ocean. She started collecting images of the underwater beauty then, and she did not stop when a shark showed his appreciation of her by head-butting her 3 times, as documented on a TV documentary in 2002.

A film of her life is being developed by Jodie Foster, who will direct and star in the piece.

In an interview shortly before her death, she stated that if she had known that Triumph of the Will (1935) would have haunted her career, she would have never made it.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890- 1945". Pages 952-957. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Holds the record for the longest length of time in between projects. After Tiefland (1954), it was 48 years before she directed another film, the documentary Underwater Impressions (2002). She's also the oldest director to helm a documentary. She was 99 when she made the latter film.

A band called the World/Inferno Friendship Society has a song out called "Leni at the End of Time.".

Her second husband, Horst Kettner, had been her companion since the 1968. He was 42 years younger than her. They married right before her death.

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