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Unashamed Tightwad. The plain fact seems to be that Actress Schell suffers from a virulent condition known in show business as "star personality." She is a diva on the grand, almost forgotten scale. Says one of her directors: "Maria is an unmitigated egomaniac. For her, nobody else really exists." Says another: "She lets nothing, but nothing, interfere with her career. She is a pure power type. What love means to most women, fame means to Maria." And if a sense of humor includes the ability to laugh at oneself, she is blankly devoid of humor.
Like Sarah Bernhardt—who forced her managers to trot backstage after every performance with a little bag of gold—Maria is an unashamed tightwad. Her colleagues say that she overworks and underpays her personal staff, and scrimps on the hairdresser by having her hair done free at the studio. In Europe she negotiates all her own contracts—a practice that saves plenty in legal fees. Yet, though Maria can think like a man when she has to, she all too often talks like a stubbornly opinionated woman, and her excellent European education gives her a mighty big bat to swing at the conversational ball. She is, for instance, a connoisseur of Japanese poetry, and is fluent in five languages (German, Swiss-German, French, English, Italian).
As in business, so in love. "Maria doesn't give," says one of her old beaux. "She takes. She is more like a man than a woman." Says Maria: "Without love, I can't glow [leuchten]." Nowadays the glow is supplied by a German director named Horst Haechler, whom she married last April.
The Right Way. Maria's glow—an astonishing animal incandescence that Germans call "the golden look"—does not shine only for the camera's eye. She plays to her friends as well as to her audiences, and she plays with most devastating effect to her directors. It works like this, says a French actor: "Maria is one of those people who is convinced that the right way to do a thing is her way. She is therefore determined to direct the director, and she is smart enough to go about it in the sweetest possible way. 'Don't you really think we should do it like this?' she will ask. And the director, confronted with that overpowering smile, is sure to give in, unless he has the strength of a lion." If he doesn't give in, Maria knows how to take her revenge. When she could not break the will of Director René Clément, she forced him to delay release of the French version of Gervaise for a full six months while she perfected her "southern accent" and haggled for the right to dub her own part—a procedure that seriously embarrassed him financially.