As a geyser with an insatiable appetite for cinema history, my introduction to Marlene Dietrich was Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Even in a cameo role as a brothel madam in Welles’ film, she was mesmerising and the love affair between star and camera that began 30 years earlier in the Sternberg films endured even though Dietrich was in her fifties.

Ute Lemper. Photograph © Lucas Allen

Hailed as the new Marlene after a Paris production of Cabaret, but embarrassed at the comparison, Ute Lemper wrote a letter of apology to the legend who had locked herself away in her Paris apartment, “I stopped showing my face, I was sick of being Marlene Dietrich”. Returning to her own apartment after a performance, Lemper was shocked to be handed a message from the night porter telling her to ring Dietrich. What ensued was a three-hour conversation (where Dietrich did the talking as she refused to be questioned) where the baton was passed from star to starlet.

While that telephone conversation is the foundation for this rendezvous, Lemper becomes the first person vessel for Dietrich’s...