Actress, Marlene Dietrich Daughter Was 100

Maria Riva, the only child of Marlene Dietrich who as a rare contract player with CBS was one of the top television personalities in the medium’s early days of live, kinescope broadcasts, died Wednesday. She was 100.

Riva died in her sleep at the home of son Peter Riva in Gila, New Mexico, he told The Hollywood Reporter. She had been living with him since early last year.

William S. Paley’s favorite actress, Riva starred, often as a woman in peril, on such classic anthology series as Studio One, Lux Video Theatre, Suspense and The Philco Television Playhouse and on shows including Danger, Crime Photographer and Climax!

She quit acting in the late 1950s — she often described herself as a “Poor Man’s Dietrich” and admitted she never had a burning ambition to be an actress — but managed her mother’s glitzy one-woman Las Vegas act and global tours for many years.

A few months after Dietrich died in Paris in May 1992 at age 90, Riva published a book about her glamorous movie-star mother. “I consider myself a biographer, not the daughter,” she said in a 2009 chat for the Television Academy Foundation website The Interviews.

“I’m very proud of the fact I was able to step back as a biographer … what was wrong was wrong, what was right was right, what was great was great, what was brilliant was brilliant. [People] don’t understand how it is possible to be a child of an ephemeral creature that is beyond normalcy. It’s very difficult.”

The only child of Dietrich and Rudolf Sieber, an editor and assistant director who later was put in charge of translating films for Paramount in Paris, Maria Elisabeth Sieber was born in Berlin on Dec. 13, 1924.

“But I never thought that was my name, because being the child of a very famous person, I was always ‘Maria, the Daughter of Marlene Dietrich,’” she said. “I actually signed it that way when I was a child.”

When she was 5, she “was imported” to Los Angeles to live with her mother, by then a huge star at Paramount Pictures.

­­Riva played Catherine the Great as a child — Dietrich portrayed the Russian monarch as an adult — in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), then appeared in another film starring her mom, David O. Selznick’s The Garden of Allah (1936), an early Technicolor release.

Later, she was raped repeatedly by a woman who was the secretary of one of her mother’s lovers, she said.

Riva attended the Brillantmont International School in Switzerland and studied acting as a teenager at the Max Reinhardt Academy in Los Angeles at Wilshire & Fairfax, where the Academy Museum is now.

She then taught and directed there — her students included Elizabeth Taylor’s brother, Howard — acted on the radio with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and appeared on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead in Foolish Notion in 1945.

After a brief first marriage and performing in Germany and Italy for two years as part of a USO troupe, she taught a graduate course in acting and directing at Fordham University and married scenic designer William Riva in 1947, while Dietrich was away in Europe.

When she complained to him about what she was seeing on television, he said to her: “’I’m so tired hearing you criticize this new profession. Why don’t you go and do something to make it better?’ And that’s why I went into television.”

She made her first TV appearance in 1951 on the anthology series Sure as Fate before signing a three-year contract for $250 a week with CBS, which sought to create a movie-style studio system. She acted often alongside John Forsythe and appeared on hundreds of TV episodes.

“There was a saying: You played to Mrs. Glutz in the Bronx,” she said. “People who knew nothing about acting, about the profession, would now get [their entertainment] for free in their home, and they should be glad to get whatever they got. So you played to a very low standard. Which was fine, because I had no talent.”

Still, she received Emmy nominations as best actress in 1952 and 1953, appeared in a “mirror-image” photograph with her mother on the cover of Life magazine in August 1952 and later turned down an opportunity to replace an ailing Imogene Coca on NBC’s Your Show of Shows.

Riva also did TV commercials for Alcoa in which she would demonstrate how to use the company’s new product — that would be aluminum foil — and was paired with famed product pitchwoman Betty Furness when CBS tested color television for the first time.

At the height of her career as the TV industry moved west, she quit, not wanting to return to Los Angeles. “I had grown up in a world where everybody was beautiful, everybody was rich, everybody had everything that everybody else in the world wants, and nobody was really happy. And I learned a very valuable lesson, that it’s not what it looks like on the surface.”

She did tour in stage productions of Tea & Sympathy and Country Girl and noted that, “outside of Jackie Gleason and the great comedians, I was probably the first person that drew people as a television personality into another media.”

Riva returned to acting to play Mrs. Rhinelander — the wife of Robert Mitchum’s character, Bill Murray’s boss — in Scrooged (1988), directed by Richard Donner. Her first-born son, the late J. Michael Riva, was the film’s production designer, and another son, John-Paul Riva, was a production assistant in the art department.

She acted again in All Aboard (2018), a short film directed by grandson J. Michael Riva Jr.

Riva also co-authored a 2001 photography book with previously unseen images of her mother, edited a 2005 volume of Dietrich’s poetry and wrote a 2017 period novel, You Were There Before My Eyes, about a woman who emigrates from Italy to Detroit.

After Dietrich’s death from liver failure, she sold much of her mom’s estate to Berlin to be housed in the city’s Deutsche Kinemathek museum.

She and William Riva remained together until his death in 1999.

In addition to her sons Peter and John-Paul, survivors include another son, David, and her grandchildren, Lily, Ayla, Aidan and Marilee.

A timeless icon of style, Dietrich received an Oscar nomination for her turn opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) and starred in such films as Blonde Venus (1932), The Devil Is a Woman (1935), Touch of Evil (1958) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).

Dietrich and Sieber, who died in 1976, never divorced, even though they lived together for only a few years. Meanwhile, she reportedly had sex with the likes of Cooper, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Frank Sinatra, Eddie Fisher, James Stewart, Jean Gabin and Yul Brynner. And that was just the men.

While promoting her book about Dietrich, Riva told Diane Sawyer that her mom had this idea for her own funeral: “All the men who walk into the church, and women, who had slept with her would get a red carnation, and all the people who said they had slept with her but hadn’t would get a white carnation.”