Hildegard Knef, 76; Sultry German Actress, Torch Singer

Hildegard Knef, a smoky-voiced actress and singer who starred in Germany’s first post-World War II movie and scandalized church officials with a 1951 nude scene, died Friday at a Berlin hospital. She was 76.

Officials at the Heckeshorn Lung Clinic said Knef, who had suffered from emphysema, died of a lung infection after being brought to the hospital on Thursday. Her health had declined after emergency lung surgery last year.

“She was the voice of Berlin and one of Germany’s greatest international stars,” said Dieter Kosslick, the director of the Berlin Film Festival. He said the festival, which opens next week, would adjust its program to honor her.

Knef, born in Ulm, studied at the Babelsberg Film Institute and acted on stage in war-shattered Berlin just after the end of World War II. She became a star for her role as a former concentration camp inmate returning home in Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 “Murderers Are Among Us.”

Knef, who sometimes worked as Hildegard Neff in the U.S., appeared in more than 50 films, most of them made in Europe. She reportedly turned down a Hollywood studio contract after being told she would have to change her name and say she was Austrian, not German.

She scandalized Roman Catholic authorities with a brief nude scene in the 1951 German film “The Story of a Sinner.” Among her other film credits were as Pirate Jenny in a 1962 version of “The Threepenny Opera” and as Catherine the Great in “Catherine of Russia.”

Her work in the United States included the role of Ninotchka in Cole Porter’s Broadway musical “Silk Stockings” in the 1950s, and a supporting role in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story that starred Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.

She launched a career as a singer in the 1960s and wrote a best-selling 1970 autobiography, “The Gift Horse.”

She continued to act and sing almost until the end of her life, appearing as herself in the 2000 documentary “Marlene Dietrich: Her Own Song” and in the 1999 German comedy “An Almost Perfect Wedding.”

Marriages to American Kurt Hirsch and British actor David Cameron ended in divorce. She is survived by her husband, Paul von Schell, and her daughter, Christina Antonia.