Later Years and Death
Riefenstahl celebrated her 101st birthday on 22 August 2003 and, according to one tabloid in 2007, married Horst Kettner.
Leni Riefenstahl died in her sleep on the late evening of 8 September 2003 at her home in Pöcking, Germany. She had been suffering from cancer. She was buried in Munich's Waldfriedhof cemetery.
There was varied response in the obituary pages of leading publications, although most recognized her technical breakthroughs in film making:
The Daily Telegraph wrote that she
was perhaps the most talented female cinema director of the 20th century; her celebration of Nazi Germany in film ensured that she was certainly the most infamous...Critics would later decry her fascination with the athletes’ physiques as fascistic; but in truth her interest was born not of racist ends but of the delight she, as a former dancer, took in the human form.The Independent wrote that
Opinions will be divided between those who see her as a young, talented and ambitious woman caught up in the tide of events which she did not fully understand, and those who believe her to be a cold and opportunist propagandist and a Nazi by association.The Independent also offered
At the end of her long life she was still the controversial femme fatale of German films...She was interested in beauty, adventure and films, but she was famous for being the woman you love to hate.Read more about this topic: Leni Riefenstahl
Famous quotes containing the words years and/or death:
“The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)