News about Helmut Berger

RICHARD KAY: It was electrifying as an entrance. He strode on to the screen, wearing a sleek top hat and stockings in the style of Marlene Dietrich's The Blue Angel, radiating an ethereal and dangerous beauty. Helmut Berger's personal life might have matched the sordid debauchery he brought so vividly to The Damned, the controversial 1969 film in which a German arms manufacturing family's story and their links to the Nazi rise was coincidental. Berger, the heir whose emotional tumultuous journey, comes to an end with his mother's sex and her lover's forced suicide, played by Dirk Bogarde. One critic expressed his displeasure with the catalogue of murder, incest, rape, tranvestism, and child molestation as if he's spent the afternoon in the reptile house at [London] Zoo." Miss Dietrich, however, was thrilled, complimenting Berger, who spent weeks perfecting his impression of her, and sent him a picture of herself inscribed: 'Who's prettier? Marlene is a sweetheart.'