Irene von Meyendorff(1916-2001)
- Actress
Born in 1916 as the eldest child of a German-Baltic aristocrat,
Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Pauline Caecila von Meyendorff
actually never planned to become a movie star. When the Russian
Revolution broke out, the family escaped to Germany, where Irene's
mother Elisabeth left her conservative husband with the children to
live a very unconventional life in the theatre circles of
Weimar/Thuringia. In the early 1930's Irene came to Berlin to work as a
cutter in the UFA film studios of Babelsberg. As a breathtaking
beautiful, ice-cold blond young woman she would have been the ideal
star for Alfred Hitchcock movies. But these were the 1930's and she lived in
Nazi Germany. When she was discovered for the screen, her debut was
only a mediocre swashbuckler movie - which unexpectedly made her a
star. Her best part maybe was the noble Hamburg Patrician daughter
Octavia in Veit Harlan's Opfergang (1944). She never was a sympathizer of the Nazi
system. Her first husband, Dr. Heinz Zahler, was a member of the
Kreisau Circle, a group of religious motivated anti-Nazi-bourgeois. Her
beauty attracted Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda, who got a harsh
rebuff by her ("You would degrade me - and you would degrade
yourself"). Joseph Goebbels's infamous nick name "Bock von Babelsberg" (the old
horny goat of Babelsberg) was Irene's creation. After the war she only
played minor parts in German films. In 1961 she met British actor
James Robertson Justice, fell in love with him and left her second husband Pit Severin,
a journalist from Hamburg, to follow James Robertson Justice to England. It was 1968
when she returned a last time to screen for a small part in the costume
drama Mayerling (1968). She never was interested to continue her career. 8 years
after James Robertson Justice's death in 1975, she met and later married philanthropist
Keith Bromley. Even at the age of 70 she sailed to the Artic and the
Orinoco River. On September 28, 2001, she died in Hampshire after a
full, remarkable life.