Marlene Dietrich’s smoldering eyes could reduce a man to stutters with a single, withering glance. Gwyneth Paltrow’s drowsy doe eyes, however, take an exhaustively long time to blink. Yet some casting director out there has put Gwyneth Paltrow in a BBC biopic about the glamorous, Berlin-born screen icon, according to Cinematical and the forever unreliable WENN. Dietrich’s carefully crafted screen persona, oozing insouciance and androgynous sex appeal with her pre-Annie Hall menswear and captivating, often leggy womenswear, was crafted in a series of pairings director Josef von Sternberg in such Paramount films as The Blue Angel, Morocco (her only Oscar nomination), Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, and The Scarlet Empress. In private, Dietrich’s numerous bisexual love affairs during her open marriage to director Rudolf Sieber, documented in a tell-all book from her only daughter Maria Riva, and on which the biopic will be based, ranged from Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Mercedes de Acosta to Jean Gabin and Edward R. Murrow. Dietrich’s mysterious final years in her Norma Desmond-like seclusion, after her star had waned simultaneously with her looks, were purportedly lived out in an alcoholism-fueled state of squalor to rival Edith Beale.
It's hard to imagine a trouser-clad Gwyneth strutting her stuff as a larger-than-life icon like Dietrich. Or recreating scenes like “Hot Voodoo” performance from Blonde Venus.