Farewell to Maria Riva, the centenarian actress who suffered all the abuses of her mother, Marlene Dietrich

BarcelonaJust a week ago, Maria Riva, an actress who triumphed on television despite the ever-present shadow of her mother, the Berlin actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, died of natural causes. A mother of four, Riva was given a eulogy by her eldest son, Peter Riva, who spoke of "Maria's intelligence, advice, and profound human understanding." "The family finds solace in knowing that she is now reunited with her husband William, with whom she shared 50 years of marriage, her eldest son Michael, and her parents, Marlene and Rudi," Peter added, perhaps driven by a kind of irrational desire for reconciliation between his mother and his grandmother. However, judging by Maria Riva's biography, perhaps he will prefer not to find his mother in heaven, if such a place exists.

Maria Riva was born in Berlin in 1924 to film director Rudolf Sieber and actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, considered a film legend and the ninth greatest female star of all time according to the American Film Institute. Although this family context might seem to many to be the ideal for raising an only child who would never want for anything, the reality is that young Maria Sieber lacked the most basic necessities. The marriage between Dietrich and her husband, who never had a real romantic relationship but were married from 1923 until his death in 1976, was an absolute torment for their daughter, whom they treated with utter cruelty, as she would later recount and prove as an adult with all kinds of evidence.

Isolated

Her mother took her from Berlin to Los Angeles as a young child, following in the footsteps of her Hollywood career. It was an abrupt change for a child, crossing the Atlantic to settle in the United States at such a young age. This upheaval didn't concern Dietrich enough to enroll the girl in a school that would help her settle in the country and make friends. Ignoring the child's needs, she made her live an adult life, always keeping her by her side and educating her through governesses. This situation continued for years and years until the girl was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where she spent the entire year except for the summer, when she returned to...warm maternal. As a young woman, Riva had already chosen –we will never know if freely or not…– acting as a career, a profession in which she had already debuted as a child when Dietrich cast her to play her daughter in the film Royal whim.

Throughout her life, she trained on several occasions to become a respected actress. In fact, she even became a professor of acting at Fordham University in the USA. It was there that she met the man who would be her husband for the rest of her life, the set designer William Riva, from whom she was never separated between 1947 and 1999, when he died. She had been married before, but her marriage had lasted only a year. Her first husband was the actor Dean Goodman. She would later confess that she married him only to escape her mother.

Professional Success

Already married to William Riva, the actress carved out a solid place for herself in the American acting scene. During the 1950s, she secured a lucrative contract with CBS, a partnership that earned her two Emmy nominations. That all came to an abrupt end in the 1960s when she returned to Switzerland, where she had been sent to live away from the noise that had always surrounded her. Although she agreed to work on a Richard Donner comedy film in the 1980s, her most significant return to the public eye came with the biographical book she dedicated to her mother in 1992, after the legendary actress... Lili Marleen She dies. Throughout 800 pages, Riva listed all the details of the ordeal she had to live through with her acclaimed mother, accompanied in all events by her husband, who came out just as badly as the actress in that book.

He was 70 years old when he signed Marlene Dietrich by her daughter, Maria RivaThe work, which became a best-seller Internationally, she portrayed the artist as a cruel and sadistic mother who made life miserable for her only daughter, who suffered from alcoholism and suicidal thoughts throughout her life as a result of that terrible childhood and adolescence. She explains that, aside from not letting her go to school, her mother prevented her from socializing in order to keep her under control. Dietrich took this strategy to unimaginable extremes: according to Riva, the protagonist of The Blue Angel He orchestrated a plot to have his daughter repeatedly raped by the nanny. The goal was for his daughter to lose all sexual interest and remain single forever with him, as he wanted her permanently at his beck and call.

He also psychologically tortured her by telling her that breastfeeding had ruined her breasts or by making her go crazy with lies about her age so she wouldn't look so old. This abuse continued into adulthood, when he publicly criticized her acting.

A terrible father

Riva corroborated all this gruesome information with letters, telegrams, and her mother's own diaries, which documented many of these macabre acts. This irrefutable evidence also served to portray her father in a negative light, as he and her mother formed a terrible duo for their daughter, but also for those around them. Among these people were the lovers they both had.

Riva elaborated on the case of Tami Matul, a Russian refugee and lover of her father, who even moved into the couple's home, pretending—to outsiders, because everyone inside knew everything—that she was their housekeeper. Matul, although she had no mental health issues when she arrived at the Siebel-Dietrich home, died in a mental health facility after the couple forced her to undergo 15 abortions to erase all evidence of her relationship with Marlene Dietrich's husband. Riva, who claimed to love Matul because she acted as her nanny and was the closest thing she had ever had to a mother, coldly recounted that it had taken "almost 30 years to break her soul and shatter her mind" before they let her die in a psychiatric institution where they rushed her to her death. "My parents were two very meticulous people," Riva wrote about Matul's end. Maria Riva, who in some passages of the book treats Dietrich with a certain compassion, explains that the actress was addicted to alcohol and drugs, narcissistic, selfish, and excelled at manipulating those around her. However, she explained that these were not her main problems. The diagnosis of the now-deceased Riva is that she spent her life trying to be loved in a pathological way. It was an obsession that, in her opinion, was never satisfied, since, in Riva's words, she never truly knew love.