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Scene Stealer. It happened suddenly. A friend of mother's came looking for a girl to play a small part in a picture (Steinbruch) that he was making. When he saw Maria he asked her to read a minor role; when he heard her read, he offered her the main part. The picture was a hit, and papa gave in; she enrolled at Zurich's School of Theatrical Arts. "She worked like the devil," says one of her instructors. Within a few months she was starring in a stage version of the film she had made. The critics were impressed, the audience was overwhelmed, her fellow actors were appalled. She stole scene after scene with the cunning of a crow, and when she was charged with the larceny, she only blinked her big round eyes and vowed that it was only "natural exuberance." One day an actor decided to get even. At a point in the script where he was supposed to slap her lightly, "he slapped me so hard it almost knocked me down." But it was no use. "I cried real tears of pain and looked so genuinely hurt and startled that the audience stood and cheered." Says Director Josef von Baky: "It was all there at 17. The tremendous intensity and ambition, the radiance and the look of sentimental innocence, the specific Schell personality." At 20, Maria was hired by the State Theater of Bern as its leading lady. Salary: $250 a month. Repertory: Shakespeare, Shaw, Goethe, Ibsen.
A World Reputation. At 22, Maria made tracks for Vienna and the famous Burgtheater. the sum and summit of the German theatrical tradition. She never quite made it. A film director named Karl Hartl met her in a cafe, felt the burn of her blowtorch intensity, and offered her on the spot the lead in the picture he was casting. She took the job, and pretty soon any number of Herzen, as the romantic rumors had it, were beating in Dreivierteltakt. She was simultaneously supposed to be in love with Producer Ernst Lothar, with a cameraman named Günther Anders, and with the famous star of the Burgtheater, Attila Hörbiger. In any case, the picture (The Angel with the Trumpet) somehow got made, and she was so good in it that the producers were soon pounding at her door.
Sir Alexander Korda, the British movie mogul, signed her to a seven-year, nonexclusive contract. The late great Albert Basserman dragged her off on a tour of Europe to play Gretchen to his Faust. By 1950 she was in a flood tide of some of the weepiest (and most popular) German pictures ever made. This was her Seelchenperiode as a leidender Engel (suffering angel), the shopgirl's ideal, when the Schell smile was as famous in Germany as the Monroe walkaway was in the U.S. Maria and Dieter Borsche, with whom she was starred in Es Kommt Ein Tag, were the "ideal couple" of Lieschen Müller (the Jane Doe of Central Europe), whose interest was still further excited by rumors that the passion was even more flaming off the screen than on. In 1952, when Borsche was replaced by O. W. Fischer, "Schell-Fisch" became an even more popular couple.