Romy (2009)

In May 1981, Romy Schneider collapses in a taxi. During emergency surgery, one of her kidneys is removed because of a tumor. Flashbacks then show scenes from her childhood with her grandparents at the Mariengrund country estate, and as a young girl at the Goldenstein boarding school. In 1953, she gets a role alongside her mother, Magda Schneider, in the film When the White Lilacs Bloom Again, which makes her famous overnight. At the same time, her mother has married for the second time, to the restaurant magnate Hans Herbert Blatzheim, who thereafter acts as Romy's manager. In 1955, Romy achieves her definitive breakthrough with Sissi. Two more films about the Austrian empress follow, but when her stepfather, with whom her relationship has grown increasingly strained, and her mother demand that she make a fourth Sissi film, she firmly refuses. Instead, in 1958 she makes a film called Christine in France, falls in love with her co-star Alain Delon, and moves to Paris to live with him. He introduces her to Luchino Visconti, who gives her a role in one of his plays. In 1964, Delon leaves her; in despair, she attempts suicide, but is rescued. She meets the German actor Harry Meyen, who divorces his wife for her, and marries him on July 15, 1966. Their son, David Christopher, is born on December 3 of the same year. However, professional failures turn Meyen into a bitter man, and he increasingly gives himself over to drinking alcohol and taking pills. In 1968, she acts with Delon again, and the film The Swimming Pool becomes a great success. By 1973, she and Meyen have grown completely apart, and she moves to Paris with their son. They divorce in 1975. In France, she is a celebrated star and receives the French film award, the César, in 1976. In 1975, she marries her secretary, Daniel Biasini, who is eleven years younger than she is, and has a daughter with him, Sarah Magdalena, on July 21, 1977. Her ex-husband Meyen takes his own life in his home in Hamburg in 1979. In 1981, she divorces Biasini. Romy has to undergo kidney surgery. On the day she is discharged, her son David, now 14, picks her up from the hospital; she plans to act with him in her new film, The Passerby of Sans-Souci. But only a few days after she leaves the hospital, David is killed in an accident while trying to climb over the fence onto the property of the parents of his former stepfather, Daniel. Despite this devastating blow, she makes The Passerby of Sans-Souci as planned. But shortly after filming wraps and just a few weeks before the film's premiere, Romy Schneider dies in her Paris apartment.