Zarah Leander

Step by step she would get engagements on Swedish stages and in Swedish films, but she would never regain the popularity she had enjoyed before and in the first years of World War II. However, she died prior to filming the third season and the writers wrote her character's death into the story as well. Zarah Leander had been far too much associated with the Nazi propaganda, and was shunned. Nancy Marchand (June 19, 1928 - June 18, 2000) was best known for her Emmy award-winning role on the HBO series, The Sopranos as Soprano family matriarch Livia Soprano and mother of Tony Soprano. After the Wehrmacht's defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi criticism and pro-Americanism came to dominate totally in Sweden. Her villa in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Grunewald was hit in an airstrike, the increasingly desperate Nazis pressured her to apply for German citizenship, and she decided to break her contract with Ufa, leave Germany, and retreat to Sweden, where she had bought a mansion at Lönö, not far from Stockholm.

Zarah Leander's last film in Nazi Germany went up at the theaters on March 3, 1943. Many of her songs had a frivolous undertext, or could at least be interpreted that way. Her was the role of a femme fatale, independently minded, beautiful, passionate and self-confident. She played roles with, basically, the same personality in all her German films; some said she played herself.

A stupefied Propaganda Minister Goebbels dubbed her "Enemy of Germany", but as a leading film star at UFA, she participated in ten films, most of them great successes, and great contributions to the Third Reich's propaganda, as a counterweight to the international isolation and criticism that not the least Swedish newspapers demonstrated. At the same time, she landed a contract with UFA in Berlin, and became known as an extraordinarily tough negotiator, demanding influence, high salaries and half of it paid in Swedish currency. It was followed by the film Premiere, in which she played the role of a successful cabaret star. It was a parody on Hollywood and not the least a parody of the German Marlene Dietrich, who had fled a Europe marked by Mussolini's, Stalin's and Hitler's stars.

A second break-through, by contemporary measures her international debut, was the world premiere (1936) of Axel an der Himmelstür at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna, directed by Max Hansen. And she knew the language!. What if she brought her children with her, and then some day found herself without employment? A mother could not divorce from her children, and she would not put them at such a risk. Austria and (Nazi) Germany were much closer. In her view it was, most of all, too insecure.

As a mother of two school-age children, she ruled out a move to America. Zarah Leander opted for an international career on the European continent. Her fame brought her proposals also from the European continent and from Hollywood, where a number of Swedish actors and directors were working. In the following years, she embarked on a splendid career and could make a decent living as a popular artist on stage and in film in Scandinavia.

However, it was as operetta artist, as Anna Glavari in Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow that she had her definitive break-through (1931). By then she had divorced Nils Leander. In 1930, she participated in four cabarets in the capital, Stockholm, made her first records, including a cover of Marlene Dietrich's "Falling in Love Again," and played a part in a film. However, in 1929 she was engaged, as an amateur, in a touring cabaret by Ernst Rolf and for the first time sang "Vill ni se en stjärna," which soon would become her signature tune. As a teenager she lived two years in Riga (1922–1924), learned the then most important international language, German, took up work as a secretary, married Nils Leander (1926), and had two children (1927 & 1929).

Although Zarah Leander studied piano and violin already as a small child, and sang on stage for the first time at the age of six, she made a serious attempt at an ordinary life. She was born as Zarah Stina Hedberg in Karlstad, and died in Stockholm. Zarah Leander (March 15, 1907 - June 23, 1981) was a famous European actress and singer of Swedish nationality.
Zarah Leander.