Hildegard Knef was an actress, singer and writer from Ulm, Germany who began her acting career at the start of World War II. Though most of her films were released after the war, she made several movies while the Third Reich was still in power. After marrying American Kurt Hirsch, Knef finally agreed to pursue a career in the US, where she found a fair degree of fame in Cole Porter's Broadway production Silk Stocking. In 1963, she switched her focus to singing and earned a reputation for her deep and textured voice, but eventually returned to Berlin after the reunification. Throughout the rest of the 1960s and 1970s, she worked as a singer and writer of German chansons and is most widely known for song "Für Mich Soll's Rote Rosen Regnen." Knef was also a published author, and her autobiography, Der Geschenkte Gaul- Bericht aus Leben, detailed her life during World War II and her battle with breast cancer.
