Rosemarie Lindt: The Prima Ballerina Who Vanished From Italian Erotic Cinema
Rosemarie Lindt: Why a Prima Ballerina Starred in Italian Erotic Cinema, Then Disappeared
If you're a film buff who grew up on Italian genre cinema, you've seen her face. Maybe you didn't know her name.
She's the elegant blonde in the Frau Wirtin costume comedies. She turns up in Aldo Lado's giallo Who Saw Her Die?, in Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty, and in the erotic thriller Emanuelle e Françoise. For more than fifteen years, Rosemarie Lindt moved through Italian cinema like a recurring character in a long, strange dream.
Then, in 1979, she was gone. No farewell interview, no scandal, no comeback. Just silence.
That's where this investigation begins. Because the more you dig into her story, the stranger it gets. Before Cinecittà, before the nude scenes and the exploitation posters, Rosemarie Lindt was something few people remember: a classically trained prima ballerina who had danced at the Paris Opera.
So how does a ballerina from one of Europe's most respected dance schools end up in Italian erotica? And why did she vanish from the screen at the height of the genre's boom?
Let's open the case file.
The Dancer: Rosemarie Lindt's Early Life, Kurt Jooss, and the Paris Opera
Every investigation starts with the subject's background. And Rosemarie Lindt's background has nothing to do with sex comedies.
Born in Düsseldorf, 1939
Rosemarie Lindt was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1939, the year the Second World War began. She grew up in a country shattered by war and slowly rebuilding itself, in a Rhineland city that had been heavily bombed.
For a young girl in postwar Germany, dance offered something rare: discipline, beauty, and a way out. And Rosemarie had talent.
The Folkwang Scholarship: Chosen by Kurt Jooss
Here's the first major clue that she was no ordinary starlet. Rosemarie Lindt studied at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, one of the most important dance schools in Europe.
Her teacher was Kurt Jooss, a giant of 20th-century dance. Jooss was a pioneer of German expressionist dance theater, and his anti-war ballet The Green Table (1932) is still performed around the world. He's often mentioned alongside the founders of modern dance theater, and his influence runs straight through to Pina Bausch, who also trained at Folkwang.
According to her IMDb biography, Rosemarie Lindt was the only student to receive a full scholarship from Jooss. Think about what that means. Out of all the young dancers passing through one of Europe's top schools, the master picked her.
Jooss's method wasn't about pretty poses. It was about using the body to tell stories and express emotion. Keep that in mind, because it matters later, when we look at how she moved on screen.
Paris: Training With Nora Kiss
From Germany, she went to Paris, the capital of European ballet. There she trained under Madame Nora Kiss, a celebrated ballet teacher whose Paris studio attracted professional dancers from all over the world.
Studying with Kiss meant polishing classical technique to the highest level. Combine that with Jooss's expressive training, and you get a dancer with both precision and drama.
Prima Ballerina: Wuppertal, Düsseldorf, and the Paris Opera
Now we come to the credentials that make this story so surprising. Rosemarie Lindt performed as prima ballerina, the leading female dancer of a company, at:
- the Wuppertal Opera House, a city that would later become world-famous for dance through Pina Bausch
- the Düsseldorf Opera House, in her hometown
- the Paris Opera, one of the most prestigious stages in the world
- the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris
These are not small stages. For a dancer, they're the big leagues.
A Multilingual European Artist
There's one more detail worth noting for our investigation. Rosemarie Lindt speaks fluent German, French, English, and Italian. In the 1960s, that made her the perfect European co-production performer, someone who could move between German, French, and Italian film sets without missing a beat.
The First Question
So by the early 1960s, here's what we know. Rosemarie Lindt was a highly trained dancer, handpicked by one of the century's great choreographers, with leading roles on major European stages.
That's not the typical profile of an actress who ends up in Italian erotic comedies.
Which brings us to the first big question in the case: why did she leave Paris for Rome? The answer, like so many turning points in life, involves a man, a job offer at Cinecittà, and a decision that would change everything.
The Move: How Rosemarie Lindt Went From Ballet to Cinecittà in the 1960s
Every investigation has a turning point. In the case of Rosemarie Lindt, it came in 1963, and it had a name: Jacques Herlin.
Following Love to Rome
Herlin was a French actor, a lean character player with a face made for cunning officials, eccentric aristocrats, and comic villains. He and Rosemarie were a couple in Paris. Then Herlin landed something rare for a working actor: permanent employment at Cinecittà, the great Roman film studio.
So by 1963, the two of them moved from Paris to Rome.
Pause on that for a moment. A prima ballerina at the height of her training leaves the Paris stage to follow her boyfriend to Italy. That's our first real clue, and it tells us something important: Rosemarie Lindt's film career didn't begin with ambition. It began with a relationship.
Rome in 1963: The Perfect Place for a Dancer to Become an Actress
Now look at what she found in Rome. The Italian film industry of the early 1960s was one of the busiest in the world. Studios were cranking out peplum epics (sword-and-sandal films full of musclemen and dancing girls), comedies, costume dramas, and international co-productions.
And many of those films needed exactly what she had: a trained body, grace in costume, and the discipline to hit marks and follow direction. Dancers were constantly in demand for palace scenes, banquets, harem sequences, and musical numbers.
Add her languages (German, French, Italian, English) and her looks, and it's no surprise the studio system found her quickly.
The First Films: La ballata dei mariti and Hercules the Invincible
Her first screen role came in La ballata dei mariti (1963), an Italian comedy. It was a minor part, the kind of small role newcomers use to learn how a film set works.
Then came Hercules the Invincible (1964), a classic of the peplum boom. For film buffs, this is a perfect example of the genre: oiled muscles, cardboard monsters, and exotic kingdoms. It's also exactly the kind of film where a trained dancer fits in naturally.
In 1965 she appeared in Don Camillo in Moscow (Il compagno don Camillo), one of the beloved Don Camillo comedies starring the French comic legend Fernandel as the feisty priest and Gino Cervi as his communist rival, Peppone. For a newcomer, that was a respectable credit in a hugely popular Italian franchise.
These early roles were small. But they show a pattern: she wasn't pushed into erotica right away. In the early 1960s, Rosemarie Lindt was a working supporting player in mainstream Italian genre films.
Enter Franz Antel and the Frau Wirtin Series
The real transformation came in 1967, when she joined the cast of Die Wirtin von der Lahn, released in English as The Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan and in Italy as I dolci vizi... della casta Susanna.
The director was Franz Antel, an Austrian veteran who knew exactly what the late-1960s audience wanted. The film was an Austria-Italy-France-Hungary co-production: a bawdy costume comedy set during Napoleon's occupation of Germany, built around Susanne, a beautiful redheaded innkeeper played by Hungarian actress Teri Tordai (credited as Terry Torday).
Rosemarie Lindt played Bertha, one of the women around Susanne's inn. And here's a key detail for our investigation: Jacques Herlin was in the cast too, playing Governor Dulce. The couple from Paris was now working side by side.
The film was a hit. Even though Susanne ostensibly dies at the end, its success launched a whole series of Frau Wirtin films, known to English-speaking audiences as the Sexy Susan films.
Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968): A Cast Full of Future Icons
She returned as Bertha in the 1968 sequel, Sexy Susan Sins Again (Frau Wirtin hat auch einen Grafen). Herlin was back too, this time as Leduc, the scheming counsellor to Elisa Bonaparte.
Look at that cast list today and it's a treasure map for Euro-cult fans. Hollywood's Jeffrey Hunter, famous from The Searchers and the original Star Trek pilot, plays Count Enrico. And among the women of the inn, alongside Rosemarie Lindt, you'll find Edwige Fenech and Femi Benussi, two actresses who would soon become queens of Italian giallo and sex comedy.
In other words, the Frau Wirtin films were a kind of training ground for the next decade of Italian erotic cinema. And Rosemarie Lindt was right there in the class of 1968.
1969: House of Pleasure and Carnal Circuit
By 1969, the series continued with House of Pleasure (Frau Wirtin hat auch eine Nichte), another Antel production with Lindt and Herlin. It's still the most-searched Frau Wirtin title in Germany today.
That same year she appeared in Carnal Circuit (Femmine insaziabili), a stylish erotic thriller that points toward the darker, sexier cinema of the coming decade.
Analysis: Why a Dancer Fit the Frau Wirtin Formula
So why did a prima ballerina work so well in these films? Look at what the Frau Wirtin series demanded. Period costumes: corsets, gowns, and petticoats. Physical comedy, with chases, slapstick, and bedroom farce. Group scenes that had to be choreographed like a stage number. And the constant, cheeky display of the female body in various stages of undress.
For most actresses, that's a lot to manage at once. For a dancer, it's second nature. Ballet teaches you to move beautifully in costume, to hit precise positions, and to be completely at ease in your own body in front of an audience. Kurt Jooss's training went even further, teaching his dancers to tell a story through movement alone.
And there's another practical factor. These co-productions were usually dubbed, so an actress's voice often didn't reach the audience at all. What reached them was her face, her body, and how she moved. For a performer trained to communicate without words, that was an advantage.
By the end of the 1960s, the transformation was complete. The ballerina from Düsseldorf had become a familiar face of European erotic costume comedy. But the 1970s would push her into far darker, more explicit territory.
The 1970s: Rosemarie Lindt's Characters, Italian Exploitation Cinema, and the Culture of Nudity
If the 1960s were Rosemarie Lindt's apprenticeship, the 1970s were her immersion. And to understand what happened to her in this decade, we first have to understand the machine she was working inside.
The Culture: Why Nudity Became the Currency of Italian Cinema
By the early 1970s, Italian censorship had loosened dramatically. What had been hinted at in the Frau Wirtin costume comedies could now be shown directly. And the market responded instantly.
This was the golden age of Italian exploitation cinema, a system built on speed, low budgets, and one simple rule: give audiences what television can't. Producers pre-sold films to foreign distributors based on a title, a poster, and a promise. That promise was usually some mix of sex, violence, and scandal.
Every genre absorbed it. The giallo killed beautiful women in stylish ways. The poliziottesco, Italy's gritty cop thriller, filled its nightclubs with strippers. The commedia sexy built entire plots around maids, teachers, and nurses undressing. And after Emmanuelle exploded worldwide in 1974, Italian producers rushed out dozens of imitations.
For actresses, this meant a clear, unspoken deal. Nudity was part of the job. Refuse, and there were dozens of younger women waiting. Accept, and you worked steadily.
Rosemarie Lindt accepted. And the evidence shows she worked constantly, appearing in gialli, crime films, sex comedies, war films, and erotic thrillers throughout the decade.
Who Saw Her Die? (1972): Gabriella
Let's start with the film giallo fans know best. In Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l'ha vista morire?), directed by Aldo Lado, she plays Gabriella.
The film stars former James Bond George Lazenby as a sculptor searching for his young daughter's killer in a haunting, wintry Venice. It's one of the most respected gialli of the era, praised for its atmosphere, its eerie children's-choir score by Ennio Morricone, and its dark theme of hidden abuse among the wealthy.
For our investigation, this credit matters. Who Saw Her Die? is a serious, well-made genre film, not cheap exploitation. Her presence in it shows that directors saw her as more than a body on screen. It remains one of the titles she's best known for today.
Execution Squad (1972): Into the Poliziottesco
The same year she appeared in Execution Squad (La polizia ringrazia), the film often credited with launching the whole poliziottesco genre. These were hard, angry films about crime and vigilante justice in 1970s Italy, reflecting real fears of the "years of lead."
She returned to the genre in 1975 with an uncredited role as a stripper in The Manhunt. That single credit tells the story of how these films used women: often as decoration in nightclub scenes, a moment of skin before the next shootout.
Heroes in Hell (1973) and Tales of Erotica (1973)
In 1973 she played Maria in Heroes in Hell, a war adventure, and Betta in Tales of Erotica, one of the many Decameron-style bawdy period films that flooded Italian screens after Pasolini's The Decameron became a hit. The Italian market had discovered that medieval costumes and classic literature made nudity feel almost respectable.
La cameriera (1974): Yvette, and the Maid Fantasy
In La cameriera (1974), she played Yvette. The same year, she played a maid in the French-Italian Tous les chemins mènent à l'homme.
The maid was one of the most popular erotic archetypes of 1970s Italian cinema. Think of the uniform, the household secrets, the forbidden relationships between servants and masters. It was a fantasy built on class and power, and audiences couldn't get enough of it. The fact that Wikipedia uses a still from La cameriera as her main photo says a lot about how the public remembers her.
Calore in provincia (1975) and Calde labbra (1976)
In Calore in provincia (1975), she's credited simply as the Girl from Veneto. Then came Calde labbra (Hot Lips, 1976). Both were part of the wave of provincial Italian sex comedies, films about repressed small-town life cracking open. They're still searched hundreds of times a month in Italy, proof that this era has a loyal, nostalgic audience.
Emanuelle e Françoise (1975): Her Starring Role
Now we reach the most important film for our investigation. In Emanuelle e Françoise (Le sorelline), released in English as Emanuelle's Revenge, Rosemarie Lindt didn't just appear. She played the title character, Emanuelle.
The director was Joe D'Amato, the notorious king of Italian excess, just a year before he began his famous Black Emanuelle films with Laura Gemser. The story is pure 1970s shock cinema. Françoise (Patrizia Gori) is abused and exploited by her cruel boyfriend Carlo, played by cult villain George Eastman. After her sister's suicide, Emanuelle sets out to destroy him through seduction and psychological torture.
The American Genre Film Archive describes the film's revenge plot as a catalogue of transgressions, including sodomy, torture, lesbianism, and even cannibalism. This is the darkest corner of her filmography, and she was at its center.
Here's what's interesting from a critic's point of view. A Rock! Shock! Pop! review of the Severin Blu-ray notes that she looks nothing like the more famous Emmanuelles, Sylvia Kristel and Laura Gemser, yet still gives a strong performance. At 36, she was older than most erotic leads of the era, and it shows in a good way. She plays Emanuelle not as a naïve girl discovering pleasure, but as a controlled, calculating woman using sex as a weapon.
That's the Jooss training at work: precise, deliberate, every movement with a purpose.
Salon Kitty (1976): Susan
Then came the most famous film on her résumé. In Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty, she played Susan.
Based on the real Berlin brothel that Nazi intelligence used to spy on its clients, the film was a lavish international production starring Helmut Berger, Ingmar Bergman's favorite Ingrid Thulin as Madam Kitty, and Teresa Ann Savoy. It became a notorious landmark of the "Nazisploitation" trend, and one of the most controversial films of its time.
For a German-born woman who grew up in wartime Düsseldorf, playing one of the women recruited into a Nazi spy brothel must have carried an extra weight. We don't have her own words on it, but it's hard to imagine she didn't feel it.
1976: Bordella and a Busy Final Stretch
1976 was her busiest year. Besides Salon Kitty and Calde labbra, she played the wife of Gualtiero in Bordella (House of Pleasure for Women), a satirical comedy directed by Pupi Avati about a brothel for women. She was Teresa in The French Governess, Gloria in Vento, vento, portali via con te, and she appeared in the crime film Street People with Roger Moore.
1979: Porno Erotico Western, the Final Clue
And then, the last credit. In 1979 she played Alice in a film bluntly titled Porno erotico western, credited under a misspelled name.
For our investigation, this is the most revealing clue of all. By the end of the 1970s, Italian erotic cinema was sliding toward hardcore pornography. The market that had made room for dancers, character actresses, and stylish erotic thrillers was turning into something far more explicit.
A 40-year-old prima ballerina, trained by Kurt Jooss, credited under a misspelled name in a film called Porno erotico western. It's hard to read that as anything but the end of the road.
After that, Rosemarie Lindt disappeared from the screen entirely. The question is why, and where she went next.
The Motive: Why Did Rosemarie Lindt Accept These Roles?
Every good investigation eventually asks the hardest question: why?
Why would a dancer handpicked by Kurt Jooss, who had stood center stage at the Paris Opera, spend more than a decade in Italian erotic cinema, taking roles as maids, strippers, and the victims and seductresses of exploitation films?
Here's the honest truth up front: Rosemarie Lindt has never, as far as the public record shows, given an interview explaining her choices. There's no memoir, no talk-show confession, no tell-all. So we have to do what investigators do. We look at the evidence and weigh the possible motives.
Motive One: Money and the Short Life of a Dancer
Start with the most practical explanation. A ballet career is brutally short. Most classical dancers retire in their mid-thirties, often earlier, when injuries and age catch up with them. And even at the top, ballet has rarely paid well.
Rosemarie Lindt arrived in Rome in 1963 at about 24. By the early 1970s, she was in her thirties, the age when a dancer's stage career naturally winds down. Film work, even in low-budget genre pictures, offered something ballet couldn't: steady income, sometimes several films a year.
Look at her output. In 1976 alone, she appeared in at least six films. That's not the schedule of someone chasing art. That's the schedule of a working professional who needed, and was offered, regular work.
Motive Two: The Relationship and the Studio System
Remember the first clue: she came to Rome because her partner, Jacques Herlin, had a permanent job at Cinecittà. She wasn't a star who chose Italian cinema from a list of options. She was a talented foreigner living inside the Italian studio world, with a partner already working in it.
When you live in that world, the work that comes to you is the work that's being made. And in 1970s Italy, that meant genre films. The Frau Wirtin films even cast her and Herlin together, which suggests her early film career was closely tied to his.
Motive Three: The Trend Was Everywhere
It's easy to judge from 2026. But in the 1970s, nudity in European cinema wasn't a fringe choice. It was the mainstream.
Serious, respected actresses did nude scenes. Maria Schneider did Last Tango in Paris. Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli, and Laura Antonelli all appeared nude in important films. Even Ingrid Thulin, Ingmar Bergman's leading lady, starred in Salon Kitty alongside Rosemarie Lindt.
In that climate, accepting sensual roles wasn't necessarily a sign of desperation. For many actresses, it was simply the price of working in European film. The question wasn't really "Will you do nude scenes?" It was "Which ones?"
Motive Four: A Dancer's Relationship With the Body
Here's a motive that's rarely considered, and it's specific to her. Dancers relate to their bodies differently than most people. For a ballerina, the body is an instrument, trained, displayed, and judged every day in rehearsal and on stage, often in costumes that hide very little.
That doesn't mean nudity on film was easy for her. We simply don't know. But a dancer trained in Jooss's expressive tradition, where the body tells the story, may well have seen screen sensuality less as exposure and more as performance. The body was her tool long before the camera arrived.
Motive Five: Love of Performing?
Was there also a love of performing, a genuine pleasure in being on screen? Possibly. She kept working for sixteen years, through many genres and many directors. People don't usually stay that long in a job they hate.
And some of her roles gave her real material to work with: the title role in Emanuelle e Françoise, a supporting part in a serious giallo like Who Saw Her Die?, and a place in the ensemble of a major international production like Salon Kitty. For a performer, those are chances to act, not just to undress.
Were There Scandals?
Here's where the investigation gets interesting. Search for a personal scandal involving Rosemarie Lindt, and you'll find nothing. No public affairs, no court cases, no tabloid headlines. She seems to have kept her private life completely private.
But the films were another matter. The 1970s were an era of open war between Italian filmmakers and censors. Magistrates regularly seized films for obscenity. The most famous case was Last Tango in Paris, which Italian courts condemned and ordered destroyed. Pasolini's Salò was seized too.
Salon Kitty, her most famous film, was released into exactly that climate. With its explicit sex and its mix of eroticism and Nazi imagery, it was cut, criticized, and restricted in several countries. And Joe D'Amato's Emanuelle e Françoise, with its catalogue of taboo-breaking scenes, was the kind of film that often circulated in multiple versions, with different cuts for different markets.
So the scandal was real. It just belonged to the films, not to her. She was part of controversial cinema without ever becoming a controversial person.
The Verdict So Far
Put the evidence together, and no single motive explains everything. More likely, it was a combination: a dancer's career naturally ending, a partner working inside the Italian film industry, a market that paid for sensuality, an era when nudity was normal for European actresses, and perhaps a genuine love of performing.
She's not unique in this. Swedish exploitation star Christina Lindberg followed a similar path in the same decade, becoming a cult favorite in films like Thriller: A Cruel Picture, then leaving acting entirely for a completely different career in journalism.
That pattern, a successful exit into a whole new life, may be the key to the last part of our investigation. Because whatever her reasons for entering erotic cinema, Rosemarie Lindt's reasons for leaving it seem much clearer.
The Disappearance and the Resolution: How Rosemarie Lindt Left Cinema and Returned to Ballet in New York
In 1979, Rosemarie Lindt made her last film. Then she vanished from European screens, and from the memory of most of the people who had watched her.
For fans of Italian genre cinema, that's often where her story ends: a familiar blonde face in a dozen cult films, then nothing. But our investigation doesn't stop at the last credit. Because the real answer to the mystery isn't in the film archives at all. It's in New York.
Clue One: The Industry Was Collapsing
Start with the world she was leaving. By the end of the 1970s, the Italian film industry that had employed her for sixteen years was falling apart.
Private television was about to explode across Italy, filling screens with free films every night. Neighborhood cinemas were closing. And the home video revolution was just around the corner, ready to change how audiences consumed erotic films forever.
At the same time, Italian erotic cinema was sliding toward hardcore. The stylish gialli and costume comedies where an actress like Rosemarie Lindt could act, dance, and bring presence to a role were giving way to films where acting barely mattered.
Her final credit, as Alice in Porno erotico western, under a misspelled name, tells us exactly where the business was heading. And it's hard to imagine a Jooss-trained artist wanting to follow it there.
Clue Two: Age and the Erotic Market
There's also a harder truth. In 1979, she turned 40. The erotic cinema of the era was ruthless with women's ages. Producers wanted younger faces every season, and new stars like Edwige Fenech's successors were always arriving.
Many actresses of her generation found their roles shrinking to mothers, landladies, and small supporting parts. Rosemarie Lindt didn't wait for that to happen. She chose to leave.
Clue Three: A New Love and a New Country
Here's the decisive clue. Rosemarie Lindt married Alfred Piccolo (some sources spell it Alfredo) and moved to New York City.
Notice the pattern. Her life has changed direction twice, and both times the move is connected to a partner. In 1963, she followed Jacques Herlin from Paris to Rome and entered cinema. In 1979, a new marriage took her from Rome to New York and out of cinema.
Herlin, meanwhile, kept acting for decades as one of European cinema's great character faces. Their paths had simply separated.
The Resolution: The Lindt Ballet Theater
And this is where the mystery resolves, beautifully.
In New York, Rosemarie Lindt went back to where she started. She and her husband founded their own company, the Lindt Ballet Theater, which produces original ballets. Rosemarie choreographs them, and her husband writes and directs them.
Think about what that means. The same partnership pattern that shaped her film career, working side by side with the man in her life, now served her first love. Only this time, she wasn't a supporting player in someone else's production. She was the choreographer. The creative center.
She also taught ballet at Hunter College in Manhattan, passing on the training she had received from Kurt Jooss and Nora Kiss to a new generation of dancers. Somewhere in New York, there are dancers who learned their craft from a woman who once starred as Emanuelle for Joe D'Amato, and many of them probably never knew it.
Dance Was Never the Detour
When I started this investigation, I framed it as a question: why did a ballerina end up in erotic cinema?
But looking at her whole life, the question turns around. Ballet wasn't a starting point she abandoned. It was the constant. Cinema was the detour: a sixteen-year chapter shaped by love, money, and the market of the time, in a country that happened to be making a certain kind of film.
Even on screen, the dancer never really left. You can see it in how she moved through the Frau Wirtin inn in a corset, how she played Emanuelle with cool precision, how she held herself in the ensemble of Salon Kitty. The camera recorded an actress, but it was watching a ballerina.
Why She Vanished, and Why It Matters
So why did Rosemarie Lindt disappear from film and television? Not because of a scandal, and not because she failed. The evidence points to something much simpler and more dignified: the industry was changing for the worse, her age was working against her in that market, and a new life in New York offered her the chance to return to her real art on her own terms.
She didn't vanish. She went home to dance.
For those of us who love 1970s European cinema, that's worth remembering. Behind so many of the "sexy" faces of that era were real artists: trained dancers, stage actresses, multilingual professionals who took the work available and then built lives far beyond it. Rosemarie Lindt is one of the best examples, and one of the least known.
Case closed. Or rather, case reopened, every time a film buff presses play on Who Saw Her Die? or Salon Kitty and wonders who that elegant blonde really was.
Conclusion: The Ballerina Behind the Blonde of Italian Cult Cinema
Rosemarie Lindt's story isn't the one film buffs expect. There's no scandal, no tragic fall, no secret life. Instead, there's a prima ballerina from Düsseldorf, handpicked by Kurt Jooss, who followed love to Rome, spent sixteen years inside Italian genre cinema, and then followed love again to New York, where she returned to dance.
Along the way, she left a trail of films that still fascinate collectors and cult audiences: the Frau Wirtin comedies with Jacques Herlin, Aldo Lado's Who Saw Her Die?, Joe D'Amato's Emanuelle e Françoise, where she played the title role, and Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty.
If you watch those films today, look past the posters and the nudity. Watch how she moves. That's where the real Rosemarie Lindt has been hiding all along.
Frequently Asked Questions About Rosemarie Lindt
Who is Rosemarie Lindt?
Rosemarie Lindt is a German actress and ballet dancer, known for the Frau Wirtin film series in the late 1960s and for Italian exploitation cinema in the 1970s, including Who Saw Her Die? (1972), Emanuelle e Françoise (1975), and Salon Kitty (1976).
How old is Rosemarie Lindt?
She was born in 1939 in Düsseldorf, Germany, which makes her around 86 or 87 years old in 2026. Her exact birth date isn't publicly documented.
Was Rosemarie Lindt really a ballerina?
Yes. She trained at the Folkwang University of the Arts under Kurt Jooss, who gave her a full scholarship, and later studied with Nora Kiss in Paris. She performed as prima ballerina at the Wuppertal and Düsseldorf opera houses, the Paris Opera, and the Théâtre de la Ville.
What happened to Rosemarie Lindt?
She retired from acting in 1979, married Alfred Piccolo, and moved to New York City. There, she and her husband founded the Lindt Ballet Theater, which produces original ballets that she choreographs. She also taught ballet at Hunter College in Manhattan.
What is Rosemarie Lindt's role in Salon Kitty?
She played Susan in Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty (1976), a controversial film about a real Berlin brothel used by Nazi intelligence, starring Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin, and Teresa Ann Savoy.
Did Rosemarie Lindt play Emanuelle?
Yes. She played the title role of Emanuelle in Joe D'Amato's Emanuelle e Françoise (Le sorelline) (1975), released in English as Emanuelle's Revenge, opposite George Eastman and Patrizia Gori.
Which Frau Wirtin films was Rosemarie Lindt in?
She played Bertha in The Sweet Sins of Sexy Susan (Die Wirtin von der Lahn, 1967) and Sexy Susan Sins Again (Frau Wirtin hat auch einen Grafen, 1968), and appeared in House of Pleasure (Frau Wirtin hat auch eine Nichte, 1969), all directed by Franz Antel.
Who was Rosemarie Lindt's role in Who Saw Her Die?
She played Gabriella in Aldo Lado's 1972 giallo Who Saw Her Die? (Chi l'ha vista morire?), one of the films she's best known for.
Why did Rosemarie Lindt act in erotic films?
She never explained her choices publicly. The most likely reasons were a combination of factors: the short career span of ballet dancers, steady film work in Rome, where her partner Jacques Herlin worked at Cinecittà, and a 1970s European market where nudity was a normal part of film acting.
Who was Rosemarie Lindt's partner in Italy?
She moved from Paris to Rome in 1963 with her boyfriend, French actor Jacques Herlin, who had a permanent job at Cinecittà. They appeared together in several Frau Wirtin films.
What was Rosemarie Lindt's last film?
Her last credited film was Porno erotico western (1979), in which she played Alice. She retired from acting that same year.
What languages does Rosemarie Lindt speak?
She speaks fluent German, French, English, and Italian, which helped her work in the many international co-productions of 1960s and 1970s European cinema.
Where can I watch Rosemarie Lindt's films?
Several of her films have been restored on Blu-ray, including Emanuelle and Françoise from Severin Films. Who Saw Her Die? and Salon Kitty are also available in restored home video editions, depending on your region.