Christa Lang, the German-born actress and producer who appeared in French New Wave features and served as a muse to her husband of three decades, the daring American filmmaker Samuel Fuller, has died. She was 82.
Lang died Friday at her home in Los Angeles after what was described as a brief period of declining health, her daughter, Samantha Fuller, announced.
Lang had moved to Paris and become friends with writers, actors and filmmakers including Roger Vadim, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard while appearing in Vadim’s Circle of Love (1964), Chabrol’s Code Name: Tiger (1964) and Godard’s Alphaville (1965), starring Anna Karina.
Also in Paris at the time was Fuller, who had acted in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), a precursor to he and Lang having their first date the following year in Montmartre.
After Fuller returned to the U.S., he paid for Lang’s first-class, one-way ticket to the States, and they married in 1967, when she worked opposite Elvis Presley, her teenage idol, in an uncredited role in Charro!
For Fuller, she went on to portray a rebellious German countess in the World War II epic The Big Red One (1980) and a nurse in White Dog (1980), and she was his partner in the production company Chrisam Films.
Christa Langewiesche was born in December 1943 in Winterberg, Germany and raised in postwar Essen, where she had her first poem published in a local newspaper when she was 15.
At 17, she moved to France and worked as an au pair for the Toulouse-Lautrec family, then began modeling and saving money for acting classes. (In Paris, she sat as an art model for renowned sculptor Paul Belmondo, father of actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.)
Lang acted in stage productions including La Jalousie by Sacha Guitry, then earned her first onscreen role in L’Assasin connait la musique (1963), written and directed by Pierre Chenal.
After appearing in Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders (1967) and getting married, she joined Fuller in developing projects while pursuing her academic ambitions. She enrolled in a French Literature program at UCLA and graduated with a master’s degree a few years later.
In 1972, Lang showed up in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? — she and Fuller would become great friends with the director and his then-wife, Polly Platt — and played a witty con artist on an episode of the German crime series Tatort that was written and directed by her husband.
Lang gave birth to her daughter in 1975, and nine months later they appeared as mother and child alongside Anthony Hopkins in the 1976 NBC telefilm The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case.
In 1981, the family moved to Paris to pursue European film offers for Fuller to write and direct, and they would remain there until 1995. Before returning to the U.S., however, she and Fuller traveled to Brazil to meet with Karaja Indians in the Amazon jungle for the 1994 Mika Kaurismäki-directed documentary Tigrero.
After Fuller’s death in October 1997 at age 85, Lang set out to have his autobiography, A Third Face, edited and published, and it hit bookstores in 2002. She also produced a 2013 documentary about him, A Fuller Life, that was directed by their daughter.
Her last onscreen appearance was filmed last year for an upcoming documentary about Fuller’s final feature, Street of No Return (1989).
Survivors also include her granddaughter, Samira.