It is late in the morning.

The journalist has a bottle of white wine come into the hotel room.

He assesses his counterpart coolly like a research object, his questions sound cold.

The woman hastily draws on her cigarette, emptying one glass after the other.

She looks tired, she laughs, she cries, she is silent, but she delivers what the journalist wants to hear, and because she is famous, this sentence will also appear a short time later in a Hamburg magazine: “Me I am an unhappy woman of 42 years and my name is Romy Schneider. "

Anke Schipp

Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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It is a strange feeling as a journalist on a cold day in Berlin to sit across from Marie Bäumer, who plays the woman who exposed herself to "Stern" reporter Michael Jürgs in March 1981 in her spa hotel on the Breton coast. Bäumer leans relaxed in a leather armchair and smiles: "I can reassure you, you are not Michael Jürgs and I am not Romy Schneider." Nevertheless, Bäumer is scanned: the oval face, the blue, light slanted eyes, the curved mouth. If you put her face and that of Romy Schneider on top of each other as foils, many things would be identical. Since Marie Bäumer became famous in 1995 with Detlev Buck's film “Männerpension”, there has hardly been an interview in which she is not compared with the world-famous actress.To look like Romy Schneider in the German film business is a bit like having been Romy Schneider herself: a curse and a blessing at the same time.

Well documented days on the Brittany coast

For Marie Bäumer, the film star is like an oversized shadow that has been slipped over her without her contributing to it.

“The Romy Schneider topic was raised by the press, it has absolutely nothing to do with my attitude,” she says right at the beginning of the interview, as if she wanted to avoid any misunderstanding.

“I really haven't spent my whole life playing Romy Schneider.

Nor does it annoy me to be compared to Romy Schneider, as many always think.

The only thing that surprises me that it's such a sustainable topic.

But not for me."

Bäumer turned down offers several times in which the life of Romy Schneider was to be filmed. "As long as it was only about the interpretation of an acting icon, I wasn't interested," she says. And now the film “3 Days in Quiberon”, which will start in German cinemas on April 12th. Three days in the life of Romy Schneider, 14 months before her death. Not a biopic. A black and white chamber play with four protagonists and many close-ups.

On those three days in March 1981, Romy Schneider felt like the sky over the Atlantic: gray and cold.

Her second divorce was pending, plus a custody battle over her son David, who, to Schneider's displeasure, sought support from his stepfather Daniel Biasini, from whom she had separated.

She slept badly, drank too much, took psychotropic drugs.

The cure on the Breton coast was supposed to stabilize them.

The next film was due, the “Walker from Sanssouci”.