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Christine Kaufmann in "Wild and Wonderful", 1964.

Trivia

Christine Kaufmann

  • After posing nude for "Playboy" magazine at the age of 54 in 1999, she was called "Germany's most beautiful grandmother".
  • She was fluent in German, Italian, Spanish, English and French.
  • Turned down the title role of Lolita (1962). She also turned down El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).
  • Began dating Tony Curtis when she was 16. They met on the set of Taras Bulba (1962).
  • Her father, Johannes, was a German air force officer. Her mother, Genevieve Gavaert, was a French doctor who gave up her practice to further Christine's career.
  • Germany's first-ever Golden Globe winner.
  • Her older brother, Hans-Günther Kaufmann, formed a company with Tony Curtis to sell European film location pictures to the world press while Curtis was dating Christine.
  • Ex-stepmother of Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis.
  • Was only 13 when she played Steve Reeves' love interest in The Last Days of Pompeii (1959). Reeves was well past 30. Nobody seemed to mind in those days. In her memoirs, Kaufmann admitted she found it rather funny back then. She admitted to have fallen in love with actor Ángel Aranda with whom she co-starred in two movies, but she easily "switched off" her feelings when he told her he was gay.
  • Has said on German TV that she had an affair with Warren Beatty.
  • Had her own line of cosmetics which she sold on a German Home Shopping network.
  • After Anna Karina dropped out of Boulevard Voltaire (2017), Christine approached the producers to take over from her, but Alexandre Vallès, the director, cast Fifi Chachnil instead. It would have been Kaufmann's last movie; she died three months after it was completed.
  • Began acting at the age of seven.
  • Buried next to her mother just outside Paris, France.
  • She spent the last years of her life in Munich.
  • At age four she played a princess, at five the wicked stepmother in "Snow White" on stage and at six a circus dancer and bareback rider in her first feature film. She attracted attention as a schoolgirl in Mädchen in Uniform (1958). At 14 she was in Vacanze d'inverno (1959) with Vittorio De Sica.
  • Mother of Allegra Curtis and Alexandra Curtis.
  • In March 2017, Kaufman felt sick with what she thought was flu and self-treated herself with herbs. She later collapsed at her Munich home, and taken to the local hospital. There, she was diagnosed with leukemia and induced into coma. On March 28, 2017, Kaufmann died at the Munich hospital at the age of 72, only several days after she had been diagnosed.
  • She had three granddaughters and one grandson, Raphael Curtis.
  • Of her own films, Der Geschichtenerzähler (1989) was her personal favorite. She was also a great fan of Song of Love (1950) and Donkey Skin (1970).
  • Went to school in Munich, where she started her career. She left school at age eight to support her family. She received some private lessons on film sets, but she never really had a formal school education--a fact she regretted as an adult when she wanted to turn her back on acting to study archaeology.

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