German actress and glamour model Christiane Schmidtmer claims on the cover of this Midnight published today in 1965 that she’ll do anything to be a star. Back then, that was music to unscrupulous producers’ ears. Today, producers that cross the professional line would run a serious risk of going to jail. Did Schmidtmer ever actually say this? There’s no way to know for sure, but with Midnight you can reasonably suspect that its quotes are fabricated to thrill its preponderantly male readership. As we’ve mentioned numerous times before, this was its m.o.—the provocative cover quote paired with a slinky handout photo, and an interior article bought cheap off a freelance writer who had managed to carve out ten minutes with an actress during a film junket.
So how did Schmidtmer’s career go? The quote requires we ask. Well, she appeared in about a dozen motion pictures and about the same number of parts on television, and she played, among other roles, a passenger in 1963’s Stop Train 349, a flight attendant in 1965’s Boeing, Boeing, a passenger (named Lizzi Spoekenkieker) in 1965’s Ship of Fools, and another passenger in Airport ’75—which weirdly came out in 1974. Unlike in astronomy, in cinema you sometimes have to define the term star for yourself, and we judge that she didn’t quite make it, though it’s an accomplishment of sorts to play roles in or on all the major forms of commercial conveyance—trains, planes and boats. But even if she never attained real stardom, she dazzles below, and we’ll probably see her again a little later because: Lizzi Spoekenkieker. How can we resist?
