Remembering Maria Riva
We are sad to learn that actress Maria Riva has passed away at the age of 100. The daughter of screen legend Marlene Dietrich, as a child she appeared in films with her mother before going on to become a star in early television in the 1950s.
Below are some excerpts from her 2009 interview:
On growing up on movie sets:
“[My mother] always wanted me on the set. I was sort of her handmaiden. People always think when I say I was my mother’s handmaiden that I’m bitter about it. Not at all. It was a fascinating way to grow up. … [Paramount studios] was my home. I still, if I go to Paramount today and I walk down the streets there, I feel I’m at home. I grew up in the motion picture studio, you know. … It's a whole magical world. But you learn something that is rather depressing at times. And that is that you also learn that there’s nothing behind that world. If you grow up in a motion picture studio and you see the fronts of the New York streets and the fronts of Renaissance streets in Rome and you open the door and there’s just wooden nails and hammers behind… you get an idea of life that perhaps in many ways could be warped. But it also makes you a great realist. And sometimes you must remember that life is ephemeral, even the reality of life is ephemeral. But the creation of magic, when you’re inside the creation of magic, it's magnificent. It really is wonderful to watch skilled people do skilled labor and have a skilled result.”
On how she got into television:
“I became aware of television really because a friend of my mother’s gave me and my husband our first TV set. And that was in 1948. And the TV screen was the size of a two-slice toaster. And perhaps even smaller. And it sat on a chair with you know, with the rabbit ears. And you sort of looked. And that was the first time I saw the Show of Shows. And then I watched it and I used to make criticism and I’d say, ‘Oh, come on, they can do this better,’ or ‘They can do that better.’ And my husband, he was a wonderful man, said, ‘You know, I’m so tired of hearing you criticize this new profession. Why don’t you go and do something then and make it better?’ And that’s why I went into television, really. On a dare.”
On early “live” television:
“There’s a whole generation of young people who think that television started with I Love Lucy. And they only see what was put on film. And we, in New York, never had film. We had kinescopes which were destroyed and it was all live. And once it was done, it was finished. It wasn’t like the theater where you can come back the next day and the next day and the next day and make a performance better or find little things that you hadn’t discovered before. You did it once and it was finished, never again. And that’s sort of a little bit like a war, you know. We’re all in the trenches, and at 9:00, when Studio One which was at 9:00 on Monday nights, was the big drama show on CBS. … And the red lights would go on, on the three cameras. One camera, one camera, one camera. And you did it. And then when it was finished, it was gone. Nobody saw it again. Nobody could find it again. Nobody had recorded it. And that makes a completely different type of entertainment. And the America that had gotten used to radio, they had used their imagination to visualize what they were hearing. And suddenly they had it visual in front of them. It became the power that it is now. Now it’s the great monster. But then it was the most intriguing power. You didn’t have to get dressed up. You didn’t have to go out. You didn’t have to pay. You didn’t have to get babysitters. You didn’t have to do anything. It came to you. It was a completely different psychological form of entertainment. And it still is.”
Watch Maria Riva’s full interview and read her obituary in The Hollywood Reporter.
