A portrait of Leni Riefenstahl - Audrey Salkeld

This is a biography of Leni Riefenstahl, one of the leading film-makers of the 20th century. The daughter of a plumber, Riefenstahl showed early talent as a dancer until an accident cut short her career in ballet. She learnt her film craft under Arnold Fanck and was acclaimed for a number of silent mountaineering films, most notably "The Blue Light". The film was admired by Hitler, who entrusted her with filming his Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally in 1934, and then the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. There have been persistent stories that Hitler and Riefenstahl were lovers, and that the jealous Goebbels attempted to sabotage her endeavours.;After the war, she was shunned by the film industry. In 1952 a court decided that she had indulged in "no political activity in support of the Nazi regime which should warrant punishment", but this did not stop the accusations that she remained a Nazi sympathizer. Her frenzied defence always referred back to the atrocity she witnessed on the Polish Front in 1939 as the moment she severed all connection with the Nazis. Her attempts to make films on the "modern slave trade" in postwar Africa and her involvement with deep-sea diving in her seventies speak of a restless spirit which suffered more than her enduring fame might suggest.