Featuring rare images from Pierre Passebon’s personal collection, this volume celebrates Marlene Dietrich, Hollywood’s iconic femme fatale, as immortalized by master photographers including Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Milton Greene, George Hurrell, Antony Armstrong-Jones, and others. An active participant in her photo sessions, she constructed her own unique image of charm and seduction.

Dietrich’s life was devoted to glamour for over forty years: in stage performances, on screen, and in concert. The public loved her. A modern and transgressive woman, she didn’t hesitate to break the rules by dressing in menswear (she was Yves Saint Laurent’s muse for his iconic tuxedos) or by being seen in public with her husband and her lovers (both male and female). Dietrich also refused to bend to Hollywood conventions around motherhood by raising her daughter in the limelight.

Her beauty, style, and elegance made her the archetypal femme fatale, but it was Dietrich’s unwavering confidence, gender fluidity, and firm stand against Nazism that made her a revolutionary and an icon. This volume reveals how her fascination lies not only in the way she inspired the greatest photographers and fashion designers of her time, but in how she continues to embody the essence of glamour and female independence today.

Marlene Dietrich once said, "I am not a myth." But by referencing the term, Dietrich only reinforces the fact more emphatically. For, using almost any common dictionary definition of that word, Dietrich is a myth. Her image was fashioned by director Josef von Sternberg in films like The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, and The Scarlet Empress, after which she maintained a Hollywood career that included Destry Rides Again, Rancho Notorious, and an accomplished performance in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution. She has been an object of worship to millions throughout the decades, up to and including this jaded, post-modern 21st century. She is the "intellectual's pin up girl," as author Herman G. Weinberg called her, of filmmakers and film critics alike. She is the "Monstre Sacre" as one of her recent biographers has labeled her. She is her own "Superior Product," (her daughter's words) manufactured and refined in her fertile brain. In other words, Marlene Dietrich is an icon for all ages.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren't actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema.

These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.