Our featured photo is of her and Cesare Romano in “The Devil is a Woman” directed by Josef von Sternberg. It was her favorite film because it made her look “beautiful.” You can watch it here and see if you agree.
Marlene Dietrich, a German femme fatale, is also a mutable hourglass. Like Joseph Haydn, she has a Virgo Ascendant, but her hourglass runs totally contrary to his. While he has a singleton in the third quadrant of spirituality; she has nothing. She was a professed atheist though born and raised Roman Catholic. Where Haydn has plenty of planets in the first quadrant of intellectual endeavour, Ms. Dietrich is empty.
The bottom of her hourglass ends right on the the cusp of her Seventh House of Aquarius, with Venus standing tall. Perhaps this gives added weight to her comment, supported by her daughter, that she was bisexual. This would not be notable except its part of the cutting pair (hourglasses are like scissors with two blades) and the only planet in the third quadrant. The bottom part of the blade is Uranus, the ruler of Aquarius, in the fourth house of home affairs.
- “As a child I thought my name was ‘Maria The-Daughter-Of’.”
- I think I wanted to be a teacher, or something important. My mother didn’t force me into anything.
- Most of my dear friends came from my mother’s lovers. I had a lot of strange fathers; some of them were women, some of them were men.
She married director Rudolf Sieber in 1923 and they had an open relationship, allowing each other lovers. With him, she had her one and only child Maria Elisabeth who was also born in Berlin on December 13, 1924. Miss Sieber was known professionally as Maria Riva.
Download her chart here: Marlena Dietrich,
Her planetary emphasis runs towards creativity and self-expression that she nurtured incessantly, almost narcissistically, reading her daughter’s accounts. As a singer and actress, she went on USO tours during World War II and raised War Bonds. In 1992 when she was 92 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for those efforts.
Pluto on the cusp of Gemini and Taurus bestowed her a smoky voice and a curvaceous figure. Her Neptune (29.56 in mutable Gemini) suggests she took great pains in protecting her assets and for her traveling was just a matter of course (those many planets in Sagittarius).
Her Line of Personality is conjunct (Saturn Jupiter in Capricorn) making her someone who was very much part of her times (1930s-1940s Hollywood) and a wise investor — she was known to be penurious and left her daughter a fortune. Her Line of Vitality also conjunct, bestowed a long life. She has no major aspect to either to her Lines of Efficiency, definitely not her thing as Marc Jones writes “that these people are not concerned with daily details”, which is probably true as she had people for that; nor does she have a Line of Culture, that Jones later re-termed Social Significance because they are outer planets. For this lack, he writes, this is a person not particularly concerned with the socioeconomic troubles of their fellow man.
“Marlene Dietrich is a professional,” Alfred Hitchcock once said. “She’s a professional actress, a professional wardrober, a professional lighting technician. . . .” Hitchcock knew his subject well, having directed her in “Stage Fright” (1950), in which she introduced one of her favorite cabaret songs, “The Laziest Girl in Town.” Dietrich was a professional just-about-everything because of her many planets from the sixth to the eighth house in the area of work, opportunities and legacy, she wanted to make sure evveryone was doing their best to ensure hers.
According to one of her associates, at least part of the reason for her dazzling figure was a tip-to-toe flesh-colored body-stocking with the tensile strength of steel. Artifice was her fine art shown by transpluto in the sixth ; she took no chances.
Photos: Dietrich in “The Devil Is a Woman” (1935) — The keeper of her own flame. (Photographs by Movie Still Archives); Dietrich in Paris during the 1940’s.
PS. At her time of death, her progressed Saturn, Father Time, was trine her natal Midheaven. Her progressed Ceres was conjunct it and the Nodes were activated to the Ascendant.