She’s still renowned and revered for her sultry beauty that came with bedroom eyes and a timely knack for reinventing herself throughout her long career.

She was a wartime favourite who entertained the troops on the frontline, and entertained a string of lovers too, with a bisexual love life that continued well into her 70s.

She was politically outspoken, and rejected an offer of lucrative contracts from the Nazi Party if she would return to Germany, snubbing them by applying for US citizenship instead.

Not surprisingly her international stage and film career left her with little time and even less inclination to be a mother, and that’s the subject explored in the play Miss Dietrich Regrets. There’s no implication that Dietrich ever regretted not being a better mum – that’s left to her daughter Maria.

Fiona Ramsay brings the Dietrich legend alive with beautiful smoky-voiced relish, still living the dream as she acts a range of moods from coquettish and demure to demanding and inflammatory. The script by South African born playwright Gail Louw blesses her with her caustic and cutting comments that Ramsay delivers with obvious delight.

Her daughter is the exact opposite, prudish, uptight and headmistressy, but with good reason in the face of her liberated mother’s loucheness. Even the clothes speak of the differences, with the daughter dressed in a practical trouser suit and Dietrich wearing a velvet turban and holding a cigarette in bed as she holds court over the set.

Janna Ramos-Violante is excellent as Maria, simmering with repressed emotions and even now not able to withdraw from the mother who she loves disproportionally to the love she received in return.

There are moments when Dietrich is quite obnoxious to her daughter, with the script implying that there was no real relationship between them. Maria often harps back to an incident of abuse that her mother failed to notice, and highlights their lack of contact by lobbing out the comment… “when I was finally granted an audience with my mother”.

Director Sylvaine Strike has cleverly chosen to set the play in a bedroom on a film set, as if Dietrich is about to perform some great romantic love scene, with lights shining down to illuminate her. The stage and lighting design by Denis Hutchinson are excellent, underlying how the life she lived was so far removed from reality that even in bedridden old age she doesn’t know how to be the ordinary woman, and disdains the very idea.

Focusing on the relationship between mother and daughter allows Louw to weave in references that paint a bigger picture of Dietrich, but it also constrains her. Miss Dietrich Regrets is entertaining, beautifully acted and an extremely professional production, but it leaves a sense that we too have witnessed one of the less interesting aspects of this larger-than-life star. DM

Miss Dietrich Regrets runs at Sandton’s Auto & General Theatre on the Square until June 27.

All photos by Philip Kuhn.