Maria Schell, 79; International Film Star Was Subject of Documentary ‘My Sister Maria’

Maria Schell, an international film and television actress of the 1940s and ‘50s and older sister of actor and director Maximilian Schell, has died. She was 79.

Schell died Tuesday at her home in the Austrian town of Preitenegg. She had gone into a clinic recently for treatment of pneumonia.

In 2002, her brother reminded audiences of Schell’s worldwide rise to fame and her subsequent decline in his well-received documentary, “My Sister Maria.”

Maximilian Schell, in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he was directing rehearsals for the upcoming production of “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Music Center for Los Angeles Opera, called his sister “a great actress and an extraordinary human being.”

“These are maybe the hardest and most difficult hours of my life,” Schell said in a statement. “Maria was more than a sister to me. She was always my idol.”

The dazzling blond performer’s career peaked in the 1950s, when she starred in Hollywood films such as “The Brothers Karamazov” and won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for the German-language “The Last Bridge” and at the Venice Film Festival for the French-language “Gervaise.”

When “Bridge,” featuring Schell as a German doctor forced to treat Yugoslav partisans hiding out during World War II, was screened in Los Angeles in 1958, a Times reviewer raved: “Fraulein Schell, with that delicate, utterly luminous face and those immense, chastely ravishing eyes of hers, is a dramatic instrument of unbelievable sensitivity.”

Schell became a familiar face to American audiences when she appeared as Grushenka -- a role once coveted by Marilyn Monroe -- opposite Yul Brynner in Dostoevski’s “The Brothers Karamazov” in 1958.

The European actress followed that with star turns in the westerns “The Hanging Tree” opposite Gary Cooper in 1959 and “Cimarron” with Glenn Ford in 1960.

On television, she handled more classic roles, including the “Playhouse 90” production of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with Jason Robards Jr. in 1959 and a comedy special production of “Ninotchka” with Gig Young for ABC in 1960.

“The one thing that pervades all the comments about her,” Times critic Edwin Schallert wrote in 1957, when Schell was working on “Karamazov” at MGM, “is the variety of moods that she can bring to the screen.”

But Schell’s hold on Hollywood was short-lived, and she withdrew from films from 1963 to 1968. Her later roles included Nazi architect Albert Speer’s mother in the 1982 television production “Inside the Third Reich.”

Despite her some 70 films, physical and emotional difficulties -- including a suicide attempt in the early 1990s -- gradually took their toll.

At the time her brother created the documentary, Schell was living reclusively in Carinthia in southern Austria, bankrupt, battling health problems and spending much of her time watching her old movies on multiple television sets.

“It all comes back, I’m inside the scene immediately, I was so happy then,” she said in the documentary in answer to her director brother’s questions. “It’s more interesting than reality, don’t you think?”

Times film critic Kenneth Turan praised the documentary, which bluntly depicted the actress’ decline as well as her earlier success, as “a discursive, ruminative film.”

“But it’s none the worse for that,” he added. “The intensity of feeling, the honesty involved, capture us.”

Born Maria Margarethe Anna Schell on Jan. 15, 1926, in Vienna to an actress mother and playwright father, she fled to her father’s native Switzerland with her family during World War II and later became a Swiss citizen.

Schell attended Zurich’s School of the Theatrical Arts, later joining the State Theater of Bern.

She made her film debut in “Steibruch” in 1942, and her motion picture career took off when she was signed to a contract by filmmaker Alexander Korda in London.

Schell was married to German director Horst Hachler from 1957 to 1965. A second marriage to director Veit Relin lasted 22 years but also ended in divorce.

In addition to her brother, survivors include her daughter, Marie-Theres, and a son, Oliver.