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Romy Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdelena Albach-Retty in 1938 in Vienna, Austria, to two very successful actors, Wolf Albach-Retty and Magda Schneider. Her parents divorced when she was 7, and when she was 15 she made her debut in movies, using her mother's maiden name.Two years later she became very popular in a trilogy of movies called Sissi, about the early life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. In 1958, she appeared in a movie opposite French actor Alain Delon. They became engaged and she moved to France with him, marrying him when she was just 20. Over the next few years she worked with some of the greatest directors including Luchino Visconti in Boccacio (1961), Orson Welles in The Trial (1962), and Otto Preminger in The Cardinal (1963).

She divorced Delon in 1964, and she went to Germany where she married stage director Harry Meyen and they had a son. They divorced in 1975, and she married again. Her once-charmed life became filled with tragedy. She had a stillborn child in 1976 by her third husband, and her second husband committed suicide in 1979. In 1981, her son from her first marriage died when he was impaled trying to climb a fence, and he was just 14. That same year she had serious health issues and needed a kidney operation. Not surprisingly after this series of tragic events, she turned to alcohol and pills. In May 1982 she had a heart attack (or possibly she committed suicide). She was just 43 years old.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a "studio-issued" negative. What is it? It was produced by the studio but is not the camera original. It is very high quality and was created in quantity by the studios and sent to media outlets or other places that had need of the very highest quality image for reproduction purposes (in newspapers, magazines, or elsewhere). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to an image of the negative image). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). The negative is in a plastic sleeve (but we removed it and scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is). It will be sent to the winner of the auction in its sleeve.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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