Christine Kaufmann
Actress BORN JANUARY 11, 1945 DIED MARCH 28, 2017, AGED 72
DESCRIBED by her home country as the “most beautiful grandmother in Germany” actress Christine Kaufmann became the first German to win a Golden Globe award and was married to Tony Curtis in the 1960s.
Born in Styria, Austria, then part of Nazi Germany, she was the daughter of Geneviève, a French make-up artist and Johannes Kaufmann, a German Luftwaffe officer and engineer.
Growing up in Munich, Bavaria, Kaufmann became a ballerina at the Munich Opera. She started her film career at the age of seven in the 1952 adaptation of The White Horse Inn.
Two years later she got her big break in Rose-Girl Resli before coming to international attention in The Last Days Of Pompeii in 1959, starring opposite Steve Reeves, and with Kirk Douglas in Town Without Pity in 1961.
It was for this film, in which she played a German girl who was raped by American soldiers, that she won the Golden Globe. The following year she appeared in Escape From East Berlin, having turned down the title role of Lolita.
At the age of 18 she married Tony Curtis, 20 years her senior, whom she had met during the 1962 filming of Taras Bulba. They had two daughters, Alexandra and Allegra but divorced in 1968.
Kaufmann resumed her career, which she had interrupted during her marriage. She made more than 100 movies in total.
In her 50s she shocked fans when she decided to pose nude for Playboy at the age of 54, 25 years after she had first appeared in the magazine.
In 2014 she confessed to having had an affair with Warren Beatty.
Kaufmann had her own cosmetic products line and wrote several books about beauty and health, as well as two autobiographies.
She died in Munich after a battle with leukaemia and is survived by her fourth husband Klaus and her two daughters.