Hildegard Knef, who has died aged 76, was a prominent German stage and screen actor, whose role as a returning survivor of a Nazi concentration camp in Wolfgang Staeudte's Die Moerder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Amongst Us, 1946) brought her fame overnight in one of the first postwar German films. For the public, she embodied a new style of woman, composed and detached, the exact opposite of Third Reich heroines. Some critics called her "the thinking man's Marlene Dietrich".
Born in Ulm, in southern Germany, she grew up in the same Schoeneberg neighborhood of Berlin as Dietrich, with whom she later developed a close friendship.
Employed at 17 by the Ufa studios during the second world war, Knef worked as a painter and cartoonist in the animation department while studying acting at the Babelsberg film school. Her first role, at 18, in Harald Braun's Traeumerei (Dreaming, 1944) fell on the cutting room floor, but her talent as a cool, impervious blonde was quickly recognised, and she was given better parts in films directed by the intellectual phalanx in Goebbels's film office: Gerhard Lamprecht's Die Brueder Noltenius (The Brothers Noltenius, 1945), Helmut Kaeutner's Unter den Bruecken (Under The Bridges, 1945), and Erich Engel's Fahrt ins Glueck (Journey To Happiness, 1945).
After falling in love with Ewald von Demandowsky, a production chief at Tobis Film, Knef followed him during the closing days of the war to the eastern front disguised as a man, was arrested and jailed by the advancing Polish army, and later escaped from prison. Although these experiences were later used to good effect in The Murderers Are Amongst Us, the first DEFA film production, they did not sit well with allied military officials, particularly as the Staeudte film was produced in the eastern sector of Berlin.
Turning to the stage, Knef was engaged by Viktor de Kowa at the Tribuene, and by Boleslaw Barlog at the Schlosspark-Theater in West Berlin, to play leading roles in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Eugene O'Neill's O Wilderness!, Marcel Pagnol's At the Golden Anchor and Romain Rolland's A Game Of Life And Death. But after another successful screen role in Rudolf Jugert's Film ohne Titel (Film Without A Title, 1947), an ironic spoof of filmmaking, for which she was named best actress at the 1948 Locarno film festival, Knef left for the United States with husband Kurt Hirsch, changing her name to Hildegarde Neff.
After two years of unemployment in Hollywood - probably because she refused roles, possibly due to her past record with the Allies - she returned to Germany to star in Willi Forst's Die Suenderin (The Sinner, 1950), the scandalous story of a woman who prostitutes herself to save a painter from going blind, and appears naked in one key scene.
From 1950 onwards, Knef was sought by both Hollywood and German production companies. She starred in Anatole Litvak's Decision Before Dawn, her first Hollywood production shot in Germany, about which Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic, wrote: "As a watery-eyed hostess in a German cafe, Hildegarde Neff is affecting, conveying the pathos of desertion without making any piteous appeals".
Producer Erich Pommer, who had also returned to Germany, engaged Knef for three German productions. She was teamed as a prostitute again, with Hans Albers in Rudolf Jugert's Nachts auf den Strassen (Nights On The Streets, 1951) and with Erich von Stroheim in Arthur Maria Rabenalt's Alraune (1952). In Hollywood, Henry Hathaway teamed her with Tyrone Power in Diplomatic Courier (1952), and Henry King with Gregory Peck in The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (1952). Julien Duvivier directed her in her first French film, La Fete A Henriette (1952), and Carol Reed starred her in The Man Between (1953), her first Briish production.
Knef's great stage success was a 10-year span on Broadway, from 1954-65, playing Ninotchka 675 times in Cole Porter's musical comedy, Silk Stockings. The role proved so successful that she began a fabled career as, in Ella Fitzgerald's words, "the world's greatest singer without a voice".
Beginning in 1963, after appearing as Spelunken-Jenny in Wolfgang Staeudte's screen adapt- ation of Brecht/Weill's Der Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), Knef launched her new career as a chanson-singer, cemented a lasting friendship with Dietrich, and worked with Billy Wilder in Fedora (1978), her last important screen role.
Afflicted by cancer, and crippled for a time by addiction to drugs, Knef showed great courage by undergoing several operations, and continuing her tours between stage and television galas. One of her two autobiographies, The Verdict, deals specifically with her fight against cancer. When actor Romy Schneider died in 1982, Knef published a book about her friend and colleague.
Dividing her time between Berlin and Los Angeles, she was married three times: to Hirsch; to author David Cameron Palastanga, with whom she had a daughter, Christina; and to Paul von Schell, who, with Christina, survives her.
· Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef, actor and writer, born December 28 1925; died February 1 2002.