Ursula Thiess

Known to be an excellent home decorator and gourmet cook, she eventually wrote an autobiography entitled "But I Have Promises to Keep" in 2003.

Surviving an operation for a benign brain tumor in 1979, the former actress married wealthily for a third time and lived in Hawaii during part of that marriage, but would find herself widowed again in 1987 after 12 years.

Her last film was the completely overlooked Left Hand of Gemini (1972) with Richard Egan and Ian McShane.

Following her son Michael's tragic suicide from a drug overdose and husband Taylor's death shortly thereafter from lung cancer, both in 1969, Ursula was glimpsed here and there in a light sprinkling of film and TV appearances before bowing out completely.

Though she seemed quite content to be out of the limelight, she did appear with some regularity on her husband's TV series The Detectives (1959) during its first season, playing a police reporter who has a brief affair with Taylor's character. While raising her children was her prime job, she also became an active volunteer at a children's hospital.

Was up to co-star with Clark Gable in The King and Four Queens (1956) at Gable's request, but turned it down to focus on her family.

Outside of her two children by her first marriage, Ursula had two more children (Terrance in 1955 and Tessa in 1959), by Taylor.

This exotic temptation remained a fetching distraction amid the rugged scenery where, percentage-wise, the story and action remained strongly focused on her handsome he-man co-stars: Robert Stack in The Iron Glove (1954); Rock Hudson in Bengal Brigade (1954); and Glenn Ford in The Americano (1955); Robert Mitchum in Bandido! (1956), among others. Her Hollywood career wound up very short but sweet.

During her brief peak, Ursula met and eventually married the exceedingly handsome film star Robert Taylor (in 1954) and she subsequently abandoned her film career.

Billed as "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" during her initial build-up, her debut movie was as a mixed-race English/Indian girl in the outdoor drama Monsoon (1952) opposite the handsome, frequently bare-chested George Nader.

While she failed to weave the same kind of foreign magic as that of Marlene Dietrich, she was far more beautiful and was voted "Most Promising Star of 1952" by Modern Screen Magazine and a Golden Globe the next year.

After being offered a movie contract with RKO Pictures, she relocated to the United States in 1951, the same year she was featured on the June 4 cover of Life Magazine.

Daughter Manuela (born in 1944), and son Michael (1946-1969) with first husband Georg Thieß.

With two children (Manuela and Michael) in tow, she found work in the late 1940s/early 1950s as a fashion model in Berlin. She left postwar Germany at the urging of Howard Hughes and signed up with his RKO company for film representation.

When she was 12 years old in Germany she went to a movie theater and saw Camille (1936) and, she said, "swooned" when she saw Robert Taylor. Eighteen years later she married him.

Gorgeous was too tame a word for this foreigner stunner. Glamorous brunette beauty Ursula Thiess was born Ursula Schmidt in Hamburg, Germany on May 15, 1924, the daughter of Hans Schmidt, who managed a printing company, and Wilhelmine Lange, her turbulent childhood including working as compulsory farm laborer on the orders of the Nazi government when the teen refused to join the paramilitary Hitler Youth Movement. She later began her entertainment career in her native homeland appearing on the stage and dubbing female voices in American films. Married to director Georg Thieß, the couple's marriage was a relatively unhappy one and they eventually divorced.