Biography

Sybille Schmitz

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The enigmatic actress remains one of the most interesting figures in German film. Although she achieved stardom early in her career, the tragic Sybille Schmitz could never fit in with her surroundings. Too "alien looking" for Hollywood, Schmitz never migrated to America like her more glamorous peers and began losing roles in her native Germany as well due to her vaguely Semitic appearance and ties to the Jewish community. After the war, like many former UFA stars, Sybille was seen as a painful reminder of the Third Reich and she was once more displaced by the optimistic "new look" actresses. With acting being her sole reason to thrive, Sybille Schmitz began to drink heavily and rely on drugs as her career sank lower and lower. She finally committed suicide under mysterious circumstances on April 13, 1955, while being "cared for" by a corrupt lesbian doctor she was living with at the time of her death.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous

Her tragic life after the end of World War II - struggling to get roles, drug addiction, suicide - inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder to make his acclaimed film Veronika Voss (1982).
At the time of her death, Sybille had been living in Munich with a woman named Ursula Moritz, a physician who allegedly sold her morphine at an inflated rate and kept Sybille 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 use to Moritz, the "good doctor" facilitated her suicide.
She became destitute and committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. One year later, legal action was brought against her lady doctor because of improper medical treatment.
After the war demanding roles nearly stopped for the expressive Sybille Schmitz. She appeared among others in the movies Zwischen gestern und morgen (1947), Sensation im Savoy (1950) and Illusion in Moll (1952), but her way back to the anonymity she repressed with drugs. It followed depressions and several attempted suicides, finally the committal to a psychiatric clinic.
Coincidentally, the last film she made less than two years before taking her own life (Das Haus an der Küste (1954), now considered a lost film) had Sybille'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 Sybille's character, also in a final act of desperate hopelessness.