Biography
Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef (* 28 December 1925 in Ulm; † 1 February 2002 in Berlin) was a German actress, voice actress, chanson singer, and author. While she was known as Hildegard Knef in German-speaking countries, she referred to herself as Hildegarde Neff outside of the German-speaking world from 1948 to around 1968. She became a US citizen in 1950 and regained German citizenship in 2001.
Knef began her film career at the end of the Nazi dictatorship and became a film star in the immediate post-war period with movies like Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946) and Film ohne Titel (1948). She played the lead role in the controversial film Die Sünderin (1950), after which she turned to more international film roles in the 1950s and played a leading role on Broadway. In later years, she was particularly successful as a chanson singer (for example, with her signature song Für mich soll’s rote Rosen regnen) and as an author.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.