Schmitz attended an acting school in
Cologne and got her first engagement at
Max Reinhardt's
Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1927. Only one year later, she made her film debut with
Freie Fahrt (1928), which attracted her first attention from the critics. Her other early movies include
Pabst's
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929),
Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), and eventually
F.P.1 (1932), where she played her first leading role. Schmitz established herself as a prominent actress in the German cinema with the films which followed including
Der Herr der Welt (1934),
Abschiedswalzer (1934),
Ein idealer Gatte (1935), and
Fährmann Maria (1936). She also had roles in
Die Umwege des schönen Karl (1937),
Dance on the Volcano (1938),
Die Frau ohne Vergangenheit (1939),
Trenck, der Pandur (1940) and
Titanic (1943). Schmitz's career remained strong even though she was never officially endorsed by the
Reichsfilmkammer and had a strained relationship with
Joseph Goebbels. However, her explicitly non-
Aryan appearance relegated her mostly to
femme-fatales or problematic foreign women. After
World War II, Schmitz was shunned by the German film community for continuously working during the
Third Reich, and it became difficult for her to land roles. She appeared in supporting roles in such movies as
Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947),
Sensation in Savoy (1950), and
Illusion in a Minor Key (1952), but was beset with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, several suicide attempts and committal to a psychiatric clinic. Her self-destructive behavior and numerous affairs with both men and women further alienated Schmitz from the film industry and her husband, screenwriter Harald G. Petersson. Coincidentally, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (1953's
The House on the Coast, now considered a
lost film) had Schmitz's character committing suicide as a last act of desperation. A much earlier film,
Frank Wisbar's
The Unknown (1936) ends with the suicide of Schmitz's character, also in a final act of desperate hopelessness.
Death On 13 April 1955, Schmitz died by
suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills; she was 45 years old. At the time of her death, she had been living in
Munich with a woman named Ursula Moritz, a physician who allegedly sold her
morphine at an inflated rate and kept Schmitz doped up while squandering the little funds she had available to her. Schmitz's family claimed that once the actress proved to be of no more use to Moritz, the physician facilitated her suicide. One year after Schmitz's death, charges were filed against Dr. Moritz for improper medical treatment. ==Legacy==