At the end of her life when she was diagnosed with throat cancer Marisa Mell was living back in Vienna (Austria) after having lived in Rome (Italy) for decades. It was not a free choice of hers but out of necessity having no more money to spend and live "la dolce vita", the life of the rich and famous as she had done so many years in the highest political and cultural circles. The lights of showbizz had been dimmed a long time ago, friends had gone on to other places and showbizz friendships and even a devoted partner for life was nowhere to be seen. Marisa Mell was all alone except for a few very devoted friends like Father Laun, at that time a parish priest in Vienna, now Bishop, who helped her to earn some money by working for him and others and her agent Agnes Rehling was tried to book new roles in movies, theatre or television productions. And then of course there was a long time friend "Erika Pluhar", who wrote a wonderful book about her deep friendship with Marlies Moitzi, who later became the international film star "Marisa Mell". In this clip, Erika Pluhar tells about the time when she and Marlies went to theatre school, how stunningly beautiful she was and how, when she had survived till today, would probably had regained her career to take more mature roles like for example Michelle Pfeifer did!
The above clip comes from the DVD "Gaslicht", a made-for-TV remake of a Ingrid Bergman film from the 1940's with Erika Pluhar as "Bella Manningham". Next clip is for many Marisa Mell fans one of her best and most beautifuly shot movies the giallo "La Encadenada". Here you can clearly see what Erika Pluhar is talking about when mentioning the beauty of her best friend.
Thanks to Marisa Mell filmographer André Schneider for the clips of Erika Pluhar and Marisa Mell in "La Encadenada"'. André Schneider has written a great in depth review for this movie and many other Marisa Mell movies on his blog
And ready she was not! Being trained as a theatre and movie actress she had no idea what it required to be a musical actress. Although there is a lot in common between the two disciplines its major requirement is that, next to being a stage presence, you need to be trained as a musical singer. Not a common singer of pop songs or classical pieces but in the specific technique of using your singing voice on stage while acting. So you need to master two disciplines. And Marisa Mell was no singer. That was a talent she had not! She could dance, sword fight, ride a horse,... but singing she could not! Compare the 1995 re-recording of the musical sung by professional musical singers with the 1967 bootleg recording then you know what I mean. So the whole adventure in the USA turned into a disaster for her. After a try-out in Washington, D.C., the whole show was canceled and never got to Broadway much to dispair of Marisa Mell. She had high hopes that this production of "Mata Hari" would be her ticket to the USA and showbizz. It did not! She came back one year later very disappointed and desperate. People close to her mention that in fact she never recovered from it and was scarred for life! Others clame that this gave her carreer a whole other direction and was the beginning of her downfall as an A-list actress, once starring opposite Marcello Mastroianni in "Casanova 70".
"Mata Hara" is only a footnote in the musical dictionaries mentioning the musical flop that it was. So there is not much material available on the memorabelia market. Luckily there is the bootleg recording of the production with the voices of the entire cast, including Marisa Mell, speaking her role as Mata Hari with a singing pitch! We are still waiting for original film footage of the production to appear. And now there are these pictures. In my knowledge they have never been published before in any magazine in the world since the days of the production. They show Marisa Mell during a dress rehearsel of the musical on stage. From today's point of view and even from the 60's point of view they are horrible. Marisa Mell had a very sexy slime figure in those days but by the looks of it the producers did everything to cover and distract from it. They are big, dark, depressive and formless cloths. Maybe they should have reflected the poverty of the character or the dispair from World War I. Even Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady", starting out as Eliza Doolittle, the poor flower girl in Victorian London, had more beaufitul cloths than this. If these pictures give some kind of impression of the production quality than it is no wonder that, with everything else we know at the moment, this production was a faillure from the beginning. What is even more a mystery is that these cloths were drawn and made by Irene Sharaff, a 5-time Academy Award winner for productions like West Side Story, The King and I and... Cleopatra with Elisabeth Taylor. Maybe she had a headache the morning when she drew these cloths after a long night of partying and boozing in town? Who knows!
And of course, the fact that Marisa Mell appeared in two movies of the series "Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee" and "Das Rätsel des Silbernen Halbmonds" is the icing on the cake!
Thanks to Holger Haase for pointing this one out! Holger has a phantastic blog about the Edgar Wallace-movies: