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This Is Truth. Actress Schell works out her parts with a passion for detail that is eminently Swiss. For Die Ratten, in which she played a refugee girl, she traipsed over to East Berlin to have her hair done in a Sovietized style, and bought the shabby clothing she wore in the picture off the back of a girl in a refugee camp. On the set she lives with "total concentration" the character she is playing; if she wants a glass of water between takes, it is the character who makes the request. She covers her scripts with more interpretive notes than there is dialogue—but sometimes the writing is not in her usual hand. It is in what she imagines to be the handwriting of the character she is playing.
Obviously, Maria does not go through these Stanislavskian contortions for the histrionic hell of it. She finds that they give her a more immediate experience of how it feels to be the person she is portraying. As Maria explains her method and her goal: "I drive to the center of the being I must become, until I know it as I know my own. But more than that. I want the parts I play to represent not one woman, but all women, The Woman. I am trying to separate truth from reality. There are millions of leaves, each in itself a work of art. This is reality. But a leaf painted by Michelangelo is much more than just one leaf. It is The Leaf. It is all leaves. This is truth."
Always Smiling. Maria's inwardness and philosophical passion, the special glory of her art, is not merely a personal characteristic; it is the peculiar tradition of the German theater, to which she was apprenticed as soon as she could talk. Her father, Hermann Ferdinand Schell, was a Swiss playwright, moderately well known in Vienna, where he lived and worked, and where Maria Margarethe Anna Schell was born on Jan. 15, 1926. Her mother, a Viennese actress, daughter of a prominent neurologist and granddaughter of Vienna's chief of police, ran an experimental theater—along with a family of four children. Maria was the eldest, and in the nursery dramas of that stage-struck house, she insisted that she must play the Virgin Mary (Die Jungfrau Maria). She was a "sweet little blonde girl," the neighbors recall, "always happy and smiling." At six, she made her first public appearance, as the star of a drama entitled The Princess Searching for a Good Human Being, and she brought down the house.
In 1938, just after the Anschluss, the Schells moved to Switzerland and rented the Zurich villa where Richard Wagner had worked on Tristan und Isolde. Maria was packed off to a convent school at Colmar in Alsace. At 15, she begged her father to let her study dramatics, but papa was an unsuccessful playwright as well as a practical Swiss, and he laid down the law: business school. Maria took a typing course and a job wrapping books in a mail-order house. Salary: about $11.50 a month. It was grim, but it did not last long. At 16, she was a movie star.