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The point is that Maria's way is often the wrong way. Like most performers, she is a bad judge of what is good in her own work. "She consistently overacts," says one of her leading men. "And she forces the pace so hard that everyone else overacts in self-defense." She tends to read the little lines as intensely as the big ones—a practice which the French describe as swatting flies with sofas. What's more, Maria is prone to heavy Germanic mannerisms, hardly the ticket in French and British films. She overprepares her lines, to the serious loss of spontaneity. And, worst of all, she would secretly rather please the public, many of her fellow actors believe, than satisfy a role, which may mean that she would rather be a great star than a good actress.
Turn on the Faucet. Whatever her weaknesses, Maria has her qualities too, and some are prodigious. She has, says Director Brooks, "an enormously wide range of basic emotions," and she has a marvelous natural facility in expressing her feelings—a talent formed and fortified by long, hard schooling in the Central European traditions of acting. For example, she can weep to order as easily as turning on a faucet. For The Brothers Karamazov, she did five takes, without a break, of the same crying jag, and the fifth time she wept as profusely as the first. Even more remarkable, other actors say, is Maria's ability, not only to act, but to react—to lose herself in the relationships with other actors. "As you play a scene with her," says Yul Brynner, her co-star in Karamazov, "you experience a curious generation and regeneration of feeling. There seems to be no end to the possibilities of relationships between you."
Even greater than Maria's talent, moviemakers feel, is her awesome passion for work. "If hard work is genius," says Director Robert Siodmak, "that girl is a genius. She is an artist. She has the inner toughness." She drives like a demon all day, and studies far into the night. Many a dazed director has fumbled for a jangling phone in the middle of the night—Maria with a question. "I'd rather have a vulture pick my liver," says one of her victims, "than Maria pick my brains." Her energy is boundless. She is never ready to quit at closing time. One day in Berlin she begged Director Siodmak to let her make "a few more takes" while he was off the set. The scene called for Maria to run down eight flights of stairs while the camera, set up in an elevator, followed her all the way. When Siodmak came back, several hours later, the scene had been photographed 43 times, and Maria was still raring to go.