Trivia

Singer of "Lili Marlene" in USA & Europe.

She appeared on stage with Marlene Dietrich in Broadway, in which she sang and danced.

Since 2007, a street in Vienna-Liesing (23rd district) has been named after her: Greta-Keller-Gasse.

A recording contract with Ultraphon in 1929 took her from Vienna to Prague and Berlin, where she enjoyed great success with Peter Igelhoff and Peter Kreuder. For over 45 years, her voice was familiar worldwide in radio shows, films, revues, concerts and musicals, and above all in recordings.

Her second marriage started and ended in Hollywood, where she met and married Gaspar Griswold Bacon, Jr. ( = American stage and film actor David Bacon) son of Gaspar G. Bacon from a prominent family in Boston. In her later years, Keller disclosed that both she and Bacon were bisexuals and that their lavender marriage partly served as what she referred to as a "beard", allowing both of them to maintain the requisite façade in Hollywood, where they were both attempting to establish film careers.

She studied dance from the age of 8, followed by acting. Her début was in Pavillon in Vienna.

Greta Keller was an Austrian and American cabaret singer and actress, who worked in some Hollywood movies and television dramas.

Her repertoire included songs from the 1930s through the war years as well as popular songs of the day. A few years before her death, her voice was heard in the Academy Award-winning movie Cabaret (1972), in which she sang the song "Heirat" ("Married").

The poet and singer Rod McKuen was introduced by her to an audience in Vienna. McKuen, in turn, hosted a concert presenting her at Lincoln Center in the 1970s and wrote the English lyric "If You Go Away" to Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas," which she always sang.

In 1976 she appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's film Underground and Emigrants.

Her lieder voice carried the charm of the Parisian women but never lost the heart of the girl from Vienna. Greta's singing in what some call "a style reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich" comes from the fact she was the model for how Marlene Dietrich developed her own voice.

First called "The Great Lady Of Chanson" in her native Vienna, the nickname followed her to London and the United States.

Greta Keller made recordings throughout the world and from the 1920s into the 1970s. She spent many years in the United States, notably in hotel club rooms at the Waldorf and (later) the Stanhope in New York, where her show always included "My Way", with lyrics composed by Paul Anka, and a number of Noël Coward's songs.

Greta Keller's first marriage to the singer Joe Sargent in 1928 did not last; he turned out to be an alcoholic.

Her husband, known in film and theater as David Bacon, was murdered in 1943, two weeks after finishing a major role in the Republic serial The Masked Marvel. Speculation involved affairs with Howard Hughes and another actor, but the murder investigations ceased without a result, and the files later disappeared. Due to that shock and a counter-indicated dose of morphine administered by Bacon's brother, a physician, Greta's child with Bacon was stillborn. It took some time for her to recover from these events, but she restarted her career in Switzerland, then on to Vienna, Berlin and New York City.