Overview
- Peter Riva confirmed his mother’s death on Wednesday and said she had been living with him since early last year.
- As a CBS contract player in television’s live era, she appeared on major anthology series and earned Best Actress Emmy nominations in 1952 and 1953.
- She left acting in the late 1950s to manage Marlene Dietrich’s stage career, including a Las Vegas residency and international tours.
- Riva published a widely noted 1992 biography of her mother and later sold much of Dietrich’s estate to Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek for preservation.
- She is survived by sons Peter, Paul and David and several grandchildren, with her eldest son, J. Michael Riva, having died in 2012; she later returned to perform in Scrooged (1988) and the short All Aboard (2018) and published a novel in 2017.