Early rare photo on German magazine cover "Deutscher Hausfreund Illustrierte" (1960)

Today's entry is a German magazine called "Deutscher Hausfreund Illustrierte" with a very young looking 21 year old Marisa Mell on the cover. Before seeing this rare photo cover I had never heard of this magazine and a search on the internet does not give any more answers. The only thing I could find is the fusion with another magazine for women called "Für Sie" in 1964. The title got dropped in favour of the "Für Sie" title in its logo. The magazine "Für Sie" still exists to this day in Germany and has a healty print run in a crowed magazine market.

This cover is from 1960 and Marisa Mell, fresh from theater school, is starting her career in German talking movies. After the film "Das Nachtlokal zum Silbermond" she got a part in the movie "Der Brave Soldat Schwejk" with Heinz Rühmann as the main character soldier Schwejk where this photo is taken from. Marisa Mell is called "Olly" in the movie. She plays a mistress to a lieutenant in the Austrian-Hungarian army during World War I. She had only a couple of little scenes what today is being called "cameos". In the end titles she isn't even credited. Although she is wearing a student cap in this photo, it does not appear in the movie as such on her character. There are some scenes with students in the film so she probably took the cap just for the photo shoot because it looked funny. What makes this photo so special is that it is from a period when Marisa Mell had no international experience and was in fact a struggling starlet in Vienna (Austria). There aren't that many photos of her from that period. Once she was established as an international movie star things changed and you could find her on a lot of magazine covers. The film was being shot in Vienna and this was probably the reason why she got the part as a fresh new face next to the lieutenant. Nevertheless it was for her a big step forward in her career because she had not a simple walk on walk off role, no, her scenes were with two of the most popular actors at time in German speaking countries: Heinz Rühmann and Ernst Stankvoski, who is, by the way, still working at age 80. Personally I think that she was very happy with this role because it signaled to her that her career was slowly starting to take off!