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Maria Riva, the only offspring of Old Hollywood legend Marlene Dietrich, has died at 100.
Riva’s death was confirmed on Facebook by Luke Yankee, the son of late actress Eileen Heckart, who was a friend of Riva’s. He wrote, “I just learned of the passing of my darling Maria Riva, just shy of her 101st birthday. Maria was amazing — a wonderful actress, a brilliant author, and the daughter of Marlene Dietrich — among so many other things. I have some amazing stories about her.”
Riva, who would have turned 101 in about six weeks, was born to Dietrich and her husband Rudolf Sieber in Berlin in 1924, before Dietrich had crafted her image as one of the silver screen’s most alluring figures.
She candidly described her life as the daughter of the narcissistic film star in the widely acclaimed biography “Marlene Dietrich,” published in 1992, the same year Dietrich died in her Paris home at 90.
Riva approached her mother with a historian’s eye, never settling scores, but rather attempting to document the eccentric artist as a sometimes cold but inarguably gifted visual artist, one who bedded a who’s-who of 20th-century figures.
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Throughout her life, Dietrich referred to Riva as “the Child,” but Riva described a life in which she had to grow up fast, helping her mother tend her career and enduring rape at the hands of a nanny when she was just 13.
Riva acted herself, making her film debut more than 90 years ago in her mother’s epic “The Scarlet Empress” (1934), directed by Josef von Sternberg and based on the life of Catherine the Great.
She was next in “The King Steps Out” (1936) and was hired as an extra in her mother’s “The Garden of Allah” (1936).
After studying the craft of acting, she appeared on the stage, including in the 1954 Broadway show “The Burning Glass.” A CBS contract player in the ’50s, she did commercials and acted in hundreds of dramatic productions, earning two Emmy nominations.
By the early ’60s, Riva had retired from acting to assist her mother, a top international concert draw relentlessly promoted as ageless. When Riva had given birth to her first son in 1948, it inspired Life magazine to declare Dietrich the world’s sexiest grandmother at age 46.
She continued working with her mother, whose live career ended when she fell onstage in Australia in 1975 and broke her thigh, including assisting her mom into “Dietrich drag” for a lucrative cameo in the 1978 David Bowie film “Just a Gigolo.”
Upon Dietrich’s death in 1992, Riva decided to sell most of the estate to the city of Berlin for historical preservation as part of a permanent Marlene Dietrich Collection at Deutsche Kinemathek. The items were on display at Sotheby’s locations in the U.S. in 1997 prior to traveling to their home in Berlin.
Riva did come out of retirement as an actress twice — once to play the wife of Robert Mitchum’s character in “Scrooged” (1988) and once to appear in her grandson J. Michael Riva Jr.’s short film “All Aboard.”
She worked on several high-profile projects about her mother, including the 2001 book “Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories” and a poetry book, “Nachtgedanken” (2005).
Riva became a first-time novelist with 2017’s “You Were There Before My Eyes” in her nineties.
Riva was engaged to actor Richard Haydn and briefly wed to actor Dean Goodman. She was married to scenic designer William Riva from 1947 until his death in 1999, and had four children with him.
Preceded in death by their son J. Michael Riva, a production designer on films including “Django Unchained” (2012) in 2012 at 63, she is survived by their sons J. Paul Riva, Peter Riva and David Riva, and by her grandchildren.
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