Christiane Schmidtmer

Biography

Christiane Schmidtmer was a German actress and model who moved to Munich in 1959 to take acting lessons, against her family's opposition, and spent the early 1960s on the German stage and in television and film work such as Rolf Hädrich's Stop Train 349. Modeling for Max Factor brought her to the United States, and José Ferrer recommended her to Stanley Kramer, who cast her in Ship of Fools (1965) as Ferrer's German mistress and a Nazi party member. That same year she played a Lufthansa stewardess in Boeing, Boeing (1965). She was one of only a few German actresses to succeed in 1960s Hollywood, though she was usually cast as the sexualized attractive German, a niche that gave her the nickname Love Bomb. Later credits included The Big Doll House (1971), The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) and Hot Bubblegum (1981), plus commercials and voiceover work.