Career Highlights: One, Two, Three, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, La Religieuse
First Major Screen Credit: The White Hell of Pitz-Palu (1952)
Biography
Swiss actress Liselotte Pulver was a stage performer when she was discovered by Austrian director Leopold Lindtberg. Lindtberg cast the 20-year-old actress in the 1949 comedy Swiss Tour, after which she inaugurated a long career in European films, billed as Liselotte Pulver. Popular on the Continent, Pulver was little seen in English-speaking countries save for the occasional arthouse screening or late-show telecast of such films as The Adventures of Arsène Lupin (1957) and The Confessions of Felix Krull (also 1957). Lilo Pulver received special billing for the second of her three American films, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), in which she played the amply proportioned blonde secretary of philandering Coca-Cola executive James Cagney. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Liselotte Pulver (born October 11, 1929), sometimes credited as Lilo Pulver, is a Swiss actress.
Pulver was one of the stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 60s, where she often was cast as a tomboy. Despite a wide variety of roles, she is best remembered for the hearty and joyful laughter she displayed in comedies.
Pulver was born in Bern to civil engineer Fritz Eugen Pulver and his wife Germaine. In 1960, she met German actor Helmut Schmid on the set of "Gustav Adolfs Page" and married him the following year. The couple had two children, son Marc-Tell (born 1962) and daughter Melisande (born 1967).
Her daughter committed suicide in 1989. Her husband died in 1992 of a heart attack. She lives secluded in Perroy, CantonWaadt on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Career
From 1945 on she attended commercial school. After graduating in 1948, she worked as a model and took acting classes at the Bern conservatory. Following small parts at the Stadttheater Bern (city theatre), she appeared at the renowned Schauspielhaus Zürich, one of the most prestigious German-speaking theatres. Her breakthrough movie role was "Vreneli", the wife of the lead in "Ueli der Knecht", made after the novel of Swiss author Jeremias Gotthelf. One of her most recognizable roles in American cinema is that of James Cagney's sexy secretary in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three. For her role as a Russian woman in A Global Affair she was in 1963 nominated for the Golden Globe Award as best supporting actress.
From 1978 to 1983 she worked for the German edition of Sesame Street.