Heidemarie Hatheyer on AllMovie

Almost always suffering onscreen, Austrian Nazi-era star Heidemarie Hatheyer suffered in her private life as well, especially in the immediate postwar era when the Allied Military Government declared her guilty of "indirect complicity" in the mass exterminations that had taken place during the so-called Third Reich. The main complaint seems to have been her participation in Ich Klage An! (1941), a two-hour plus diatribe in favor of euthanasia. She claimed to have been forced to play the hopelessly ill victim in the film by its director, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, and the blacklist was quickly lifted. Primarily a stage actress, Hatheyer had been brought to Munich by Otto Falckenberg and scored a direct hit with theatergoers as Anuschka in Richard Billinger's Der Gigant and as George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. Der Berg Ruft (1937), one of Luis Trenker's mountain-climbing romances, brought her to the attention of the Tobis company and she went on to play the mountain girl in Die Geierwally (Wally of the Vultures, 1940) and the pregnant stage ingénue in Der Grosse Schatten (The Big Shadow, 1942). Returning to the legitimate stage after her brief period of postwar blacklisting, Hatheyer continued to appear in the odd film or television series, several times opposite her daughter Regine Feldhüter, until the late '80s. In 1960, she was awarded the prestigious Josef Kainz Medaille, an award named after the turn-of-the-century German stage star.