She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s.

Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler..."[7] Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach in Vienna, six months after the Anschluss of Austria into the German Reich.

She was born to a theatrical couple;[8] her father Wolf Albach-Retty was a leading actor of Vienna's Volkstheater, and her mother Magda Schneider starred in scores of lavish musical films in Germany.

Rosemarie, known to family as Romy from her earliest years, was educated at private schools in Berchtesgaden and Salzburg.

[8] Four weeks after her birth, her parents took her to Schönau am Königssee in Germany where she and later her brother Wolf-Dieter (born 1941) grew up with their grandparents Franz Xaver and Maria Schneider on the country estate Mariengrund.

After the summer holidays, she moved to Cologne to join her mother who lived there with the restaurateur and entrepreneur Hans Herbert Blatzheim [de].

[12] After her parents' divorce in 1945, Magda took charge of Schneider and her brother Wolf-Dieter, eventually supervising her career, often appearing alongside her daughter.

In an attempt to work on a higher artistic level, she starred with Lilli Palmer in the 1958 remake of Mädchen in Uniform.

Under Visconti's direction, she gave performances in the Théâtre Moderne as Annabella (and Delon as Giovanni) in John Ford's stage play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1961), and in the film Boccaccio '70 (segment: "The Job").

A brief stint in Hollywood included a starring role in Good Neighbor Sam (1964), a comedy with Jack Lemmon, and What's New Pussycat?

However, they remained close lifelong friends and continued to work together in such films as La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1968) and The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).

Their first collaboration, The Things of Life (Les choses de la vie, 1970) featuring Michel Piccoli, made Schneider an icon in France.

On 30 October 1974, Schneider was the second guest on Dietmar Schönherr's talk show Je später der Abend [de] (The Later the Evening) when she, after a rather terse interview, remarked passionately to the last guest, bank robber and author Burkhard Driest: "Sie gefallen mir.

)[21][22][23] After seeing her performance in Ludwig[citation needed], U.S. filmmaker Michael Cimino wanted Schneider to star as the female lead in his political love story Perfect Strangers.

Following the end of her relationship with Delon in 1964, Schneider married German director and actor Harry Meyen in July 1966; they divorced in 1975.

David died in July 1981, at the age of 14, after attempting to climb the spiked fence at his stepfather's parents' home and puncturing his femoral artery in the process.

[29] Schneider had affairs with Willy Brandt, Louis Malle (1963),[30] Sammy Davis Jr. (1964), Oswalt Kolle (1964),[31] Giovanni Volpi (1964–1970s), Luis Miguel Dominguín (1970s) and actor Bruno Ganz (early 1970s).

[43] Claude Pétin said that Schneider's cardiac arrest was due to a weakened heart caused by a kidney operation she had had months before.

Until 2002, the Austrian Federal Railways InterCity service IC 535 from Wien Südbahnhof to Graz was named "Romy Schneider".

[54] In November 2009, the ARD broadcast the feature film Romy [de] with Jessica Schwarz in the title role.