Move over, Diana. The original gorgeous but disillusioned and ultimately tragic royal woman with a humanitarian streak, an eating disorder, and a domineering mother-in-law is back — and she’s got her own Netflix budget.
Call it zero to Sisi in seconds flat. After several years off-duty, Elisabeth, the Empress of Austria from 1854 until 1898, is a favorite period drama protagonist once again, netting Un Certain Regard at Cannes and submitted as Austria’s Oscar entry, She’s green-lit for multiple second seasons. Sie ist der Moment, as they say.
Although she’s an easy target for a posthumous feminist reclamation, Sisi stories tend to be defined by two states of being, both passive. She is beloved (by her husband Emperor Franz Joseph, by her cousin Ludwig, by her son and heir apparent Rudolf, by her father, by assorted aristocratic men, by the masses) and she is thwarted (by the ravages of age, by her own vanity, by her nefarious mother-in-law the Archduchess Sophie and the hounding Countess Esterházy, by the emperor again.)
In fairness, the real Sisi was both beloved and thwarted. She was also ahead of her time, achieving something akin to self-actualization in her lifetime, albeit — and this is the fly in the feminist reclamation ointment — at enormous personal cost. “That her self-realization did not make her happy is the tragedy of her life,†wrote historian Brigitte Hamann in The Reluctant Empress, “aside from the tragedies that befell her most immediate family, set in motion by her refusal to be co-opted.â€
This refusal lasted only as long as she did. In death, she proved easily bent to prevailing contemporary sensibilities. Sisi’s posthumous résumé includes children’s cartoons, a smash-hit musical, sketch comedy, and, together with Mozart, acting as the face of Viennese chocolate. She exploded in posthumous popularity thanks to Ernst Marischka’s Sissi trilogy, released between 1955 and 1957 and anchored by an ebullient Romy Schneider. Intended at the time to comfort a traumatized postwar population, both Sissi and Schneider’s ultra-bright performance remain synonymous with the Empress herself. All recent interpretations exist in conscious reaction, if not outright opposition, to Schneider’s version. (Case in point: The German tagline for The Empress reads, “Elisabeth. Not Sisi.â€)
Sisi stories naturally comb through her distinct personal iconography, particularly the mechanisms associated with her body cult: tight-laced corsets, exercise equipment, cigarettes, her extraordinarily long hair decorated with diamond stars, her anchor tattoo, and the fans and veils which concealed her face as she aged. Franz Josef famously gave her a parrot, and few directors pass on the shoo-in motif of a pretty bird locked in a gilded cage. The real Sisi was a skilled equestrian, and she is constantly depicted on horseback. Scenes of her trotting in circles around a ring, galloping across a sweeping vista, or cantering from dead end to dead end in the palace gardens do heavy symbolic lifting. All of this is set against the backdrop of an empire in decline, simmering with a restless populace she alone can pacify.
The real Sisi remains elusive, and the interpretive and historical liberties taken within the extended Sisi-verse can border on the extreme. Each new Sisi is remade for the contemporary moment, including the most recent batch that envision her as either an especially complex female lead or a 21st-century girl in a 19th-century world. Sisi onscreen tends to be more of an ideological platform than a historical figure. Not everybody approves, especially not on history-inclined Tumblr, where The Empress’ girlboss-ification tendencies fell flat. Or, as one user put it, “girls be like I’m fighting demons and the demons be bad sisi adaptations.â€
Elisabeth von Österreich (1931)
An early biopic (and relatively early talkie), Elisabeth von Österreich established the key Sisi tropes straight away, among them Sisi’s humanist bent and the Archduchesses Sophie as the stuffy and loathsome villain, on hand here to confiscate Sisi’s newborn daughter within minutes of the birth. As a middle-aged Sisi, Lil Dagover is mildly eccentric and lightly defiant but worn down, mostly set on opposing the stiff-arming of her son into an unhappy if politically advantageous marriage. Its final third centers on her unhappy end, beginning with Rudolf’s suicide and culminating in her assassination — the only film on this list to do so on camera.
More compelling than the movie, however, are the people who made it. Dagover spent the Weimar era as a favorite of the German Expressionists, starring in Fritz Lang’s Harakiri and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Although she claimed to be staunchly apolitical and Sisi’s story was of little use to the Nazi propaganda machine, Hitler was a big fan, bestowing her with the honorary title of Staatsschauspielerin in 1937. Director Adolf Trotz disappeared from the historical record that same year, having fled to Spain in 1936 after Joseph Goebbels banned his subsequent film Ways to A Good Marriage over its “liberal and individualistic worldview†and lack of “racial instinct and racial consciousness.†The rest is history.
Mayerling (1936)
As mother to its main historical actor, Sisi necessarily plays a supporting role in the Mayerling incident and its dramatizations. The short version goes like this: In January 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf retreated to a hunting lodge with his 17-year-old mistress, the Baroness Marie Vetsera. Within hours of their arrival, he shot her, then turned the gun on himself (subsequently rerouting the line of succession toward one Archduke Franz Ferdinand). Historians suspect it was a murder-suicide pact, and filmmaker Anatole Litvak presents it as a Habsburgian Romeo and Juliet in his elegantly shot French-language production. Generally supportive of the affair, Gabrielle Dorziat’s Sisi appears periodically as a dignified elder matron figure and dark oracle. Among the first words out her mouth to Rudolf? “No one escapes destiny, my son. God grant that you learn that with time.†Later on, donning a stately black gown adorned with a diamond cross, she briefly reminisces about how “I was already unhappy at 17,†then warns Marie that the palace is an unhappy place from which she should flee. Graham Greene was among the critics who considered it “too romantic†for its own subject matter, but audiences disagreed. Its success made stars out of leads Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, then led to a 1957 TV remake again helmed by Litvak and, unlike its predecessor, best left in the dustbin of history.
Ernst Marischka’s Sissi trilogy (1955-1957)
Romy Schneider’s Sissi (mind the extra S) is the cinematic Sisi’s platonic form, bar none. She is gregarious and gorgeous, adored by the masses and Karlheinz Böhm’s Franz Josef from the moment he claps eyes on her. In fact, Schneider’s Sisi is nothing if not loveable, a shining heimatfilme princess in a story specifically intended to soothe and delight the battered Austrian-German psyche with a depiction of a harmonious pre-war past replete with traditional family values and pastoral romanticism. Kitschy they may be, but unsuccessful they were not. Sissi unseated Gone With the Wind’s record at the West German box office and spawned two sequels: 1956’s Sissi: The Young Empress, which culminates in her diplomatic triumph in Hungary, and 1957’s Sissi: Fateful Years of the Empress, in which she convalesces across southern Europe and quells Lombardy-Venetia’s separatist fervor with a display of motherly love on an official state visit. Schneider practically shimmers on camera with bright-eyed innocence and open-hearted devotion, and Marischka would have kept trotting her out had she not finally put her foot down and fled to France to date the sexiest man in continental Europe. No matter. Three films was enough to achieve iconic status, and neither she nor the historical Sisi ever fully divorced themselves from the portrayal.
Mayerling (1968)
Its textbook case of “this actor is way too hot to play this prince†notwithstanding (the Habsburgs never produced a single male heir on par with Omar “Egyptian Sex God Who Speaks Five Languages†Sharif, please be serious!!), MGM’s 1968 Mayerling remake doubles down on the sweeping romantic tragedy of the 1936 film with a few more revolutionary Hungarian rumblings for good measure. Among its peculiarities is the choice to cast Ava Gardner as Sisi, who naturally gives the Empress a shade of femme fatale. And, again naturally, Gardner’s Sisi is a presence, even and especially when she’s not onscreen. In a first-act argument with Rudolf, Franz makes a point to say they love each other in their own way despite her frequent absences. Rudolf’s wife derides Sisi as never failing to return to court “when she has the chance to give a performance of the perfect mother,†then suggests that Rudolf desires her sexually — something their affectionate scenes together reinforce. This Sisi is a realist on the subject of royal marriage but otherwise a thwarted romantic keen to support Marie and vocalize her regrets over being a deadbeat mom while wearing some of the best costumes on this list. Whether or not you buy Sisi as beguiling, Gardner’s take is nothing if not like the rest.
Ludwig (1975)
After nearly 15 years spent in Sissi’s looming shadow, it’s unlikely Romy Schneider would have reprised the one role that “stuck to [her] like oatmeal†for anyone besides Luchino Visconti, the Italian filmmaker she once described as one of the three people “who definitively transformed my life.†Having already starred in his episode of the 1962 comedic anthology Boccaccio ’70, Schneider treated Visconti’s exhaustive and exhausting four-hour epic Ludwig as both a coda and a corrective. Her resuscitated Sisi is older, wiser, far colder, and in full control of her sexual powers. She’s jaded and bitter, dishing out a meta monologue in the first 30 minutes that skewers her mother-in-law as a “hateful woman,†her husband as a man who “did not know what to do with my love,†Austrian court life as “a prison,†and her own official role as someone who exists merely “to be beautiful just to charm someone.†Her Sisi is hardened, not shattered, by the tragedies of her life, and she treats the passionate and increasingly deluded Ludwig with a cool detachment that can border on brutal: “Monarchs like us do not make history. We are just a façade. We are easily forgotten unless they give us a bit of fame by killing us.†Indeed they do.
Sisi (2009)
The weakest of the Sisi-centric TV offerings, the German-Italian-Austrian miniseries Sisi is so hopelessly trite and poorly written that it’s virtually unwatchable. Italian actress Cristiana Capotondi plays Sisi as a pie-faced and smooth-brained saint, all potential complexities of her character ironed out so she can play devoted wife to Franz Josef and weepy mother to her children. The two 90-minute episodes work through the greatest hits of her early biography with a point-blank efficiency that’s almost laughable, opening with the summoning of Sisi’s family from Possenhofen to Bad Ischl for the royal engagement and finishing it off with her Hungarian triumph via a speech delivered tearfully and with her children at her side. This version of die Kaiserpaar are smitten with each other from the jump, although Sisi does not share her husband’s enthusiasm for constant warmongering or think their sensitive son just needs a bit of toughening up at his father’s alma mater. (Yet another case of “The Crown did it better,†I’m afraid.) God, what else? The battle scenes are as convincing and well-filmed as your local historical enthusiasts’ reenactment event. Not a single extra hired for the Venetian ball scene has a shred of rhythm. That said, great gowns. Beautiful gowns.
Ludwig II (2012)
Clocking in at a defendable two hours, our own century’s Ludwig II biopic doesn’t dare expand on Visconti’s 1975 juggernaut. Instead it sidesteps the vaguely incestuous relationship between Ludwig and Sisi while reusing Visconti’s basic approach: the audience should agree with Sisi’s rationality but pity Ludwig as he is consumed by his artistic obsessions, tortured by his homosexual urges, and trampled by his political reality. Played by Babylon Berlin’s Hannah Herzsprung, Sisi appears early and on horseback wearing an almost identical (if slightly cheaper-looking) riding habit as Romy Schneider’s mature Sisi before her. She’s deployed in a rather utilitarian manner, acting as the bemused and pragmatic foil to the terminally romantic Bavarian king (Sabin Tambrea, Herzsprung’s Babylon Berlin costar who has continually cornered the German market of playing misunderstood artistic weirdos). Gentler in her approach than Ludwig’s younger brother Otto (the reliably great Tom Schilling, gleefully chewing the scenery at every opportunity), she’s still entirely unsuccessful in persuading Ludwig that Bismarck’s ambitions of German unification and the impending war with Prussia matter more than staging his BFF Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Alas. After making a final futile plea for a shred of liberal reform, she drops out of the movie altogether. Hell, at least she tried.
Sisi (2021)
Call it the post-peak-TV effect. Promoted and premiered in tandem with RTL Deutschland’s rebranding of its RTL+ streaming service, Sisi wants to make a few things clear: The new Sisi is a modern girl and she fucks. She’s introduced as a character when her sister walks in on her masturbating. Later on, she enlists a prostitute named Fanny to teach her to to please Franz, himself an enthusiastic patron of the women of the Viennese night when not engaging in hand-to-hand combat with insurgents. Dominique Devenport plays the young Sisi as smart and self-assured, essentially masterminding her engagement to Franz within hours arriving at Bad Ischl in a generous rewrite of the real thing. Once crowned, she’s preternaturally sympathetic to the plight of the masses (over whom she crowd-surfs while pregnant). But it’s Jannick Schümann’s Franz who’s oddly watchable, playing the Emperor as a brooding authoritarian and a bit of a dickhead. Between them evolves a hot-and-cold, fits-and-spurts, boning-up-against-the-wall love story that’s maddeningly paced but interesting enough in its exploration of what death and power do to a young imperial marriage. Certain scenes even approach the gothic, what with Sisi running terrified through a misty wood, her black bodice torn from neckline to navel. Not that it’s without its sins! Speaking of which, who is responsible for that gold lamé sack-back ballgown? I just wanna talk.
The Empress (2022)
Why have one runaway Netflix hit about a royal Liz whose husband has probably said something racist about Hungarians when you can have two? Like RTL+’s Sisi just before it (and in addition to teaching non-Germanophones how to pronounce “Eure Kaiserliche Hoheitâ€), The Empress adjusts Sisi’s romance with Franz to better suit modern sensibilities and fancams set to “Wildest Dreams.†Showrunner Katharina Eyssen deliberately writes Sisi into situations where she’s forced to make difficult choices, the revisionist emphasis being, of course, that she makes choices at all. Regardless she’s chronically hapless and repeatedly foiled, briefly retreating from her lofty intentions and her marriage into Champagne-soaked nihilism — an appealing dark turn in what might have otherwise been a run-of-the-mill romance. Not that the chemistry isn’t there, mind you. Philip Froissant’s Franz is dashing and unconventionally benevolent for an absolute monarch, immediately taken with Devrim Lignau’s spirited and skeptical Sisi. Bathed in blue light and set to a score of straining violins over ambient synths, the pair help The Empress land nearly all of its period drama somersaults, although the show continually wavers on whether Sisi is a victim or a proto-feminist icon in the making. Whether or not you find “Warum nicht beides?†a suitable response to that is up to you.
Corsage (2022)
It’s difficult to imagine a better choice for Corsage’s aging empress than Vicky Krieps, whose off-kilter charm and sometimes unnerving quietude translate seamlessly into a Sisi who bears minimal resemblance to prior depictions. Possessing neither political power nor meaningful influence, Krieps’s Sisi is newly 40 and dreadfully aware that the ravages of age are poised to rob her of her last and only significant role as a living ideal of royal beauty. She’s equally aware that her attempts at personal rebellion — an early departure from the banquet table with her middle finger raised, staged fainting, donning obnoxiously dark veils in public — are doomed to remain symbolic at best, so she departs Vienna to visit aristocratic relatives and work her way through a shortlist of old flames and new hobbies. Writer-director Marie Kreutzer finds an effective canvas in the historical Sisi on which to project broader themes of female pain and emancipation; her anachronistic bent, particularly in a denouement that dispenses of biographical accuracy altogether, has already launched a thousand comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on Letterboxd. But it’s also the only movie that makes the middle-aged Sisi out to be the complex woman that she indeed was. And most remarkably, Kreutzer doesn’t need Ludwig II around in order to do it.