German actress who established herself in the German cinema. Her career remained strong even though she was never sanctioned by the Reichsfilmkammer and ran afoul of Joseph Goebbels. However, her explicitly non-Aryan appearance relegated her mostly to femme-fatale roles or those of problematic foreign women.
Schmitz attended an acting school in Cologne and got her first engagement at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1927. Only one year later, she made her film debut with Freie Fahrt (1928), which attracted her first attention from the critics. Her other early movies include Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), and eventually F.P.1 (1932), where she played her first leading role.
After World War II, Schmitz was shunned by the German film community for continuously working during the Third Reich, and it became difficult for her to land roles. She appeared in supporting roles in such movies as Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947), Sensation im Savoy (1950), and Illusion in Moll (1952), but was beset with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, several suicide attempts and the committal to a psychiatric clinic. Her self-destructive behaviour and numerous affairs with both men and women further alienated her from the film industry and her own husband, screenwriter Harald G. Petersson.
Ironically, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (Das Haus an der Küste, 1953, now considered a lost film) had Schmitz’s character committing suicide as a last act of desperation.
In Munich, on 13 April 1955 at 8:45 AM, Schmitz committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills; she was 45 years old. Her final years were used as the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 movie Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss.
Link to Wikipedia biography