Overview
- Riva died in her sleep on Oct. 29 at her son Peter’s home in Gila, New Mexico, with the news shared publicly in a Facebook post by the son of her longtime friend Eileen Heckart.
- Reports from U.S. and German outlets cite her family and note she was six weeks shy of her 101st birthday.
- A prominent U.S. television performer in the 1950s, she earned two Emmy nominations before largely stepping back to support her mother on tour.
- Following Dietrich’s death in 1992, Riva wrote a widely read, unvarnished biography and later transferred much of Dietrich’s archive to Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek.
- She is survived by four sons; production designer J. Michael Riva predeceased her in 2012.