Curiosidades

Her tragic life after the end of World War II - struggling to get roles, drug addiction, suicide - inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder to make his acclaimed film O Desespero de Veronika Voss (1982).

At the time of her death, Sybille had been living in Munich with a woman named Ursula Moritz, a physician who allegedly sold her morphine at an inflated rate and kept Sybille doped up while squandering the little funds she had available to her. Schmitz's family claimed that once the actress proved to be of no use to Moritz, the "good doctor" facilitated her suicide.

She became destitute and committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. One year later, legal action was brought against her lady doctor because of improper medical treatment.

After the war demanding roles nearly stopped for the expressive Sybille Schmitz. She appeared among others in the movies Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947), Sensation im Savoy (1950) and Illusion in Moll (1952), but her way back to the anonymity she repressed with drugs. It followed depressions and several attempted suicides, finally the committal to a psychiatric clinic.

Coincidentally, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (Das Haus an der Küste (1954), now considered a lost film) had Sybille's character committing suicide as a last act of desperation. A much earlier film, Frank Wisbar's Foi o Amor (1936) ends with the suicide of Sybille's character, also in a final act of desperate hopelessness.

While never officially "blacklisted" by the Nazi regime, filmmakers were discouraged from casting her in lead roles, which were by the end of the 1930s occupied by new blonde and blue eyed stars of the Third Reich. Sybille ended up being typecast as a femme-fatale or a tempting foreign woman.

The last years of Sybille Schmitz were the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movie O Desespero de Veronika Voss (1982).

A ghostly vampire featured in one of the Vampire Hunter D novels is named Sybille Schmitz, a reference to Schmitz's role in O Vampiro (1932).

She was the subject of a documentary titled Tanz mit dem Tod: Der Ufa-Star Sybille Schmitz (2000), written and directed by Achim Podak.

She made her film debut with Polizeibericht Überfall (1928), which attracted her first attention from the critics. Her other early movies include Pabst's Diário de uma Garota Perdida (1929), Dreyer's O Vampiro (1932), and eventually I.F.1 não Responde (1932), where she played her first leading role.

Sybille Schmitz was married to the screenwriter Harald G. Petersson. The marriage broke up when Sybille Schmitz had a love affair with the theater chief Beate von Molo.

The actress Sybille Schmitz attended an acting school in Cologne and got her first engagement at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1927.

Schmitz established herself as a prominent actress in the German cinema with the films which followed including Devastador do Mundo (1934), A Valsa do Adeus (1934), Ein idealer Gatte (1935), and Fährmann Maria (1936).

She very often played self confident femme fatales.

After World War II, Schmitz hardly played interesting roles.