If you want to become a star, better start out young. That's at least what Christine Kaufmann's mother, an ambitious French makeup artist, believed. She sent her daughter to the Munich ballet, and from there she started acting. Her performance in the role of an orphan in "Rose-Girl Resli" (1954) turned the then nine-year-old child actress into a star.

After Kaufmann's breakthrough in Germany with "Rose-Girl Resli," the actress kept moving on to interesting roles. In 1958, she starred as a teenager in the film "Mädchen in Uniform" (Girls in Uniform) with Romy Schneider (third from left). Her depiction of a boarding schoolgirl was as brilliant as Romy Schneider's, according to the German daily "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."

Three years later, Kaufmann made it to Hollywood. She was selected among 30 other actresses for Gottfried Reinhardt's film "Town Without Pity" (1961). In it, she played a young rape victim, Karin, who's distressed not only by the crime, but also by its subsequent cover-up. She was awarded the Golden Globe for best new actress for her performance. Co-starring in the film was Kirk Douglas (left).

Christine Kaufmann was one of only few German actresses to have ever made it in Hollywood. She performed in several other films there. She met US actor Tony Curtis on the set of the historical epic "Taras Bulba" (1962). Kaufmann was 17 at the time, Curtis was 20 years older. They fell in love and became a couple.

Shortly afterwards, Christine Kaufmann and Tony Curtis married in Las Vegas. The bride was only 18 years old. She picked as marriage witnesses her good friend and acting colleague Kirk Douglas and his wife Anne.

One year after the wedding, Christine Kaufmann gave birth to their first daughter Alexandra (pictured), to be followed by Allegra in 1966. Over the next few years, Kaufmann withdrew from show business in order to take care of her children. After Kaufmann and Curtis divorced after five years of marriage, they got involved in a custody battle. In 1980, the two daughters returned to their mother.

After her long break, Christine Kaufmann returned to acting in 1969, playing in films by German directors like Werner Schroeter and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the early 1980s, she starred in the successful TV series "Monaco Franze," featuring the womanizing retired detective Franz Münchinger. Kaufmann played the hilariously cranky Olga.

From the mid 1980s onwards, Kaufmann worked for several theaters, among them the Schauspielhaus Hamburg and the Vienna Burgtheater. She however never managed to repeat her former Golden Globe success. She turned to other projects, like writing books on beauty and health, and marketing her own line of cosmetic products.