Hildegard Knef (1925 - 2002)


One day in the early 1980’s I was rummaging around my favorite vintage shop The Star Store when I came upon an album by Hildegard Knef. I had never heard of her before but I usually sought out recordings by artists that had a certain 50’s & 60’s sound. I went home and listened to it and was not disappointed. The album had two original songs one in German and the other in English about her career, the rest were Burt Bacharach and Cole Porter covers. It had that swinging sixties sound I loved, but I couldn’t help wondering who was this woman?



The album that I bought that day.







Touch the album cover to hear the song,"From here on it get's rough"

That's why the lady is a tramp


Love for sale


An excerpt from an article in the World Press Review:

She was not the naive blonde Fräulein so often portrayed in German postwar cinema. Hildegard Knef, a rebellious, gravel-voiced actress, was fondly called “the thinking man’s Marlene Dietrich.”Her outspokenness often caused unease in a country eager to please. She was Germany’s sole diva, leading a life of successes and sufferings, a life she called her “roller coaster.” She endured more than 50 operations but her cancer-ridden and alcohol-wrecked body always bounced back. Actress, chanteuse, author—Knef never gave in.

Read the rest of the article

I do remember seeing the movie, The Lost Continent when I was a kid, I had no idea it was Hildegard Knef I was watching up on the big drive-in movie screen.



The following is a description from allmovie.com:

The Lost Continent is a crazy-quilt of a film, with chunks of several unrelated plotlines sewn together willy nilly. Eric Porter, plays Lansen, the captain of a tramp steamer who has agreed to deliver contraband dynamite for a hefty price. His passengers are a polyglot of the good, the bad and the worse. Shipwrecked on an mysterious isle in the Sargasso Sea, Lansen and party find themselves prisoners of a bizarre inbred colony still governed by the long-abandoned edicts of the Spanish Inquisition. The film is no more coherent than the original Dennis Wheatley novel Uncharted Seas, but that doesn't detract from its endearing wackiness. To their credit, the cast members of Lost Continent play the script straight, which merely adds to the kinky fun.






































































































The Lost Continent movie trailer:

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