Ursula Thiess

Ursula Thiess was a German film actress who had a brief Hollywood career in the 1950s. She was born Ursula Schmidt in Hamburg, Germany on May 15, 1924, the daughter of Wilhelmine Lange and Hans Schmidt. She began her career on the stage in her native Germany and by dubbing female voices in American films as Ursula Schmidt. She married German film producer Georg Otto Thiess in 1942 and had two children, Manuela and Michael. They divorced in 1947 and she started a modeling career in Berlin. She was featured in many German magazines, including several cover photos, as well as the cover of Life magazine in 1954, as an up-and-coming model. She was dubbed the "most beautiful woman in the world" by some media outlets. She left postwar Germany at the urging of Howard Hughes and signed with RKO Pictures. She co-starred with Robert Stack in The Iron Glove (1952), Rock Hudson in Bengal Brigade (1954), Glenn Ford in The Americano (1955), and Robert Mitchum in Bandido (1956). She met Robert Taylor in 1952 and they married on May 23, 1954, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She virtually abandoned her film career to become a mother and housewife. The Taylors had two children, Terrance and Tessa. They moved with Ursula's two children from her previous marriage to their ranch in Brentwood, California, in 1956 and lived there until Taylor's death from lung cancer in 1969. Ursula's two children from her first marriage had many adjustment problems adapting to their new life and were often in trouble with the police, causing the family to suffer bad publicity as a result. Her son Michael, who had served a year in a German prison for attempting to poison his natural father, died of a drug overdose on May 26, 1969, shortly before Robert Taylor's own death. Ursula discovered him dead when she stopped by his motel to drop off some medication for him. After Taylor's death, she was obliged to sell their ranch. She moved to Bel Air and in 1973 she married film distributor Marshall Schacker. They remained married until his death from cancer in 1986. Ursula was known to be an excellent home decorator, gourmet cook, shadow-box maker, and UCLA Children's Hospital volunteer. She died of natural causes in an assisted-living care facility in Burbank on June 19, 2010, at the age of 86. She was survived by three of her four children, Manuela, Terrance, and Tessa. She is interred alongside her husband and her son at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.