Maria Schell began commercial training, but soon entered the film business when she met the Swiss actor and director Sigfrit Steiner.

After World War II, she was cast in her first leading role in the 1948 film The Angel with the Trumpet, directed by Karl Hartl.

Her emotional acting earned her the nickname Seelchen ("little soul"), coined by her colleague Oskar Werner.

Her daughter by her second marriage, actress Marie Theres Relin (born 1966), was married to Bavarian playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, and has three children; she made a media and internet appearance as a spokeswoman for housewives (If Pigs Could Fly.

Schell admitted to carrying on a passionate love affair with Glenn Ford in 1960 on location of their film Cimarron.

Schell lived reclusively in the remote village of Preitenegg, Carinthia, in the Austrian Alps until her death from pneumonia on 26 April 2005, aged 79.

[5] Upon her death, her brother released a statement, stating in part: "Towards the end of her life, she suffered silently, and I never heard her complain.