Highly rare vintage 3.5 x 5.25-inch sepia-tone German Ross Verlag postcard portrait, boldly signed in black fountain pen in the late 1920s. In good condition. Note that the image of the actress shown alongside the scan of the signed photo here is not actually included with the item. Sybille Schmitz, beautiful German-born leading lady of the silent and early talkie screens, starred as Elisabeth in Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Léone in Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror masterpiece Vampyr (1932), in which she is repeatedly led into a garden to be slowly devoured by a bloodsucking old crone. Alas, life imitated art for Schmitz, who was bled to death by a real-life vampire: In 1955, the actress succumbed to a drug overdose at the hand of a ruthless, manipulative physician who swindled her money while keeping her perpetually high on nonprescription morphine. She was only 45 years old and her autograph is highly elusive in any format.

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