From PEOPLE Magazine
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1902-2003
To the end, she never apologized. Not for Triumph of the Will, her brilliant–and chilling–propaganda movie about Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg rally in 1934. Not for using Gypsies interned in a Nazi concentration camp as extras in another of her films. And, above all, not for her friendship with the Führer, who anointed Riefenstahl as his favorite director in the '30s: "I did believe in him," she said in a 1992 interview, "[and] because I have told the truth, I have suffered."
Hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest filmmakers, Riefenstahl–who died on Sept. 8 of cancer at her home near Munich at age 101–had her career cut short by her association with the Third Reich. "Her skills as a filmmaker overrode her connections with the Germans, making her an example of how art can triumph over almost anything," says former Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlin. Born in 1902, Riefenstahl worked as a dancer, actress and director in her native Berlin before a fan letter to Hitler ultimately resulted in a commission to chronicle the Nazis' gargantuan Nuremberg rally in Triumph–and sealed her fate, after the Allied victory, as an artistic untouchable. Placed under house arrest for seven years, she would never again secure financing for a major motion picture. Riefenstahl, who claimed she changed her opinion of Hitler after learning belatedly of the Nazi horrors, turned her furious energy elsewhere: She took up still photography, producing two books on the Nuba tribe of Sudan; learned to scuba dive at age 71; and took a much younger partner, Horst Kettner, now 59, who stayed with her to the end. Given the controversy of her life, she once told a documentary filmmaker, "death will be a blessed relief."
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