Romy Schneider in Cinéma Palace: her legacy still captures our imagination

In anticipation of a prestigious series that Romy Schneider deserves, Cinema Palace immerses us in the tragic yet sparkling life and work of the film star who left us too early.

Romy Schneider gained world fame in the 1950s, starring in three shamelessly kitschy movie hits about the princess who marries Emperor Franz Joseph and becomes Empress of Austria. Thanks to the Sissi films, Schneider became a symbol of innocence and virtue that post-war Germany looked up to. It took blood, sweat, tears and scandals for Schneider to free herself from the image of princess Sissi. In 1958, she fell in love with young Alain Delon on the set of Christine.

She escaped the control and bourgeois thinking of her mother and stepfather and followed Delon to anti-conformist Paris. Germany considered it high treason. France savoured the engagement between the two passionate, young celebrities. But their relationship becomes one of ups and downs, filled with drama.

Schneider’s beauty, her turbulent love life, unmerciful strokes of fate and those syrupy Sissi films hide the fact that she was a supremely good and hard-working actress. At 43, she has already acted in sixty films. To her, only ten of them are “good”. After an American adventure, she decides that she best suits French films, especially those by Bertrand Tavernier and Claude Sautet.

The expo at Palace will also be accompanied by a retrospective. In Les choses de la vie, she shines brighter than ever. Watch Andrzej Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer – Schneider will forever etch herself into your memory. Even though a heart attack took her from us 40 years ago, her legacy still captures our imagination.