Karin Schubert (born 26 November 1944) is a German actress.
She appeared in film roles since 1970 and became a
pornographic actress in the 1980s.
Cinema career
Her early roles included the
Spaghetti Western
The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's filmmaking style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most o ...
''
Compañeros'' (1970)
and
Gérard Oury
Gérard Oury (; born Max-Gérard Houry Tannenbaum; 29 April 1919 – 20 July 2006) was a French film director, actor and writer.
Life and career
Max-Gérard Houry-Tannenbaum was the only son of Serge Tannenbaum, a violinist of Russian-Jewish or ...
's film ''
La folie des grandeurs'' (1971).
In 1972, she appeared in the films ''
Bluebeard
"Bluebeard" ( ) is a French Folklore, folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in . The tale is about a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives an ...
'', directed by
Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk (September 4, 1908 – July 1, 1999) was a Canadian-born American film director and editor. He was known for his 1940s films noir, noir films and received an Academy Award for Best Director, Oscar nomination for Best Director for ...
, and
Yves Boisset
Yves Félix Claude Boisset (14 March 1939 – 31 March 2025) was a French film director and screenwriter.
Early life
Boisset was born 14 March 1939, in Paris, France. He studied at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC). ...
's ''
L'Attentat
''The Assassination'' () is a 1972 French-Italian political thriller film directed by Yves Boisset. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gian Maria Volonté, and Roy Scheider, it was released in the U.S. as ''The French Conspiracy''.
The film wa ...
''.
The same year, she appeared along with
Edwige Fenech
Edwige Fenech (, ; born 24 December 1948) is a French-Italian actress and film producer. She is mostly known as the star of a series of ''commedia sexy all'italiana'' and ''giallo'' films released predominantly through her 20 year career in the ...
and
Pippo Franco in the sex comedy ''
Ubalda, All Naked and Warm''. She then started to appear in
adventure film
The adventure film is a broad genre of film. Some early genre studies found it no different than the Western film or argued that adventure could encompass all Hollywood genres. Commonality was found among historians Brian Taves and Ian Cameron in ...
s, especially with Italian actor
George Eastman
George Eastman (July 12, 1854March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Kodak, Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he ...
. The first film of this kind was a ''
Three Musketeers'' Spaghetti Western adaptation, ''
Tutti per uno...botte per tutti'' (''Three Musketeers of the West'') in 1973,
and she also appeared in the crime drama ''
Rudeness'' (1975),
and as a Russian agent in the spy film ''
Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident'' (1978) opposite
Peter Graves
Peter Graves (born Peter Duesler Aurness; March 18, 1926 – March 14, 2010) was an American actor who portrayed Jim Phelps in the television series ''Mission: Impossible (1966 TV series), Mission: Impossible'' from 1967 to 1973 and in its reviv ...
and
Curd Jürgens.
In 1975 she appeared in the hit film ''
Black Emanuelle
''Black Emanuelle'' (Italian language, Italian: ''Emanuelle nera'') is a Softcore pornography, softcore sexploitation film from 1975 directed by Bitto Albertini. The film was set in Africa and shot mostly in Kenya. The music was composed by Nico ...
'' starring
Laura Gemser
Laurette Marcia Gemser (born 5 October 1950) is an Indonesian-Dutch retired actress, model and costume designer. She is primarily known for her work in Cinema of Italy, Italian Sex in film, erotic cinema, most notably the ''Emmanuelle#Other film ...
which drew the attention of director
Joe d'Amato
Aristide Massaccesi (15 December 1936 – 23 January 1999), known professionally as Joe D'Amato, was an Italian film director, producer, cinematographer, and screenwriter who worked in many genres (western (genre), westerns, ''Commedia sexy all' ...
,
and began to take part in his erotic films, including ''
Emanuelle Around the World'' in 1977 where she played Cora Norman, the counterpart of Gemser.
Gradually losing demand as an actress in the mid-1980s, she moved to Spain, but also failed to establish herself there.
Her personal problems also contributed to her career problems: her marriage broke down, and her son became addicted to drugs, becoming so out of control that his mother became the target of his violent outbursts.
To earn money for his treatment, Schubert started posing for
pornographic magazine
Pornographic magazines or erotic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines or sex magazines, are magazines that contain content of an explicitly sexual nature. Publications of this kind may contain images of attractive naked subjects, as is ...
s, but when the money from this ran out, in 1985 at the age of 40, she also began starring in
hardcore pornography
Hardcore pornography or hardcore porn is pornography that features detailed depictions of sexual organs or sexual acts such as sexual intercourse, vaginal, anal sex, anal, oral sex, oral, or Non-penetrative sex#Manual sex, manual intercourse; e ...
films.
Using her notoriety as leverage, she signed a contract with a film company that paid her an annual salary of 180,000 German marks, to perform in films mostly in Italy and West Germany.
In 1994, 50-year-old Schubert left pornography, having starred in 24 films of this genre.
That same year she tried to commit suicide by taking barbiturates with vodka, but was rescued by neighbors.
Two years later, neighbors found her unresponsive in her car, having attempted suicide a second time by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Selected filmography
* ''
A Sword for Brando'' (1970)
* ''
Compañeros'' (1970)
* ''
La folie des grandeurs'' (1971)
* ''
Bluebeard
"Bluebeard" ( ) is a French Folklore, folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in . The tale is about a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives an ...
'' (1972)
* ''
L'Attentat
''The Assassination'' () is a 1972 French-Italian political thriller film directed by Yves Boisset. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Gian Maria Volonté, and Roy Scheider, it was released in the U.S. as ''The French Conspiracy''.
The film wa ...
'' (1972)
* ''
Ubalda, All Naked and Warm'' (1972)
* ''
Master of Love'' (1972)
* ''
The Three Musketeers of the West'' (1973)
* ''
La Punition'' (1973)
* ''
The Girl in Room 2A'' (1974)
* ''
Till Marriage Do Us Part'' (1974)
* ''
Black Emanuelle
''Black Emanuelle'' (Italian language, Italian: ''Emanuelle nera'') is a Softcore pornography, softcore sexploitation film from 1975 directed by Bitto Albertini. The film was set in Africa and shot mostly in Kenya. The music was composed by Nico ...
'' (1975)
* ''
La dottoressa sotto il lenzuolo'' (1976)
* ''
Emanuelle Around the World'' (1977)
* ''
Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident'' (1978)
* ''
Black Venus'' (1983)
* ''
The Nurse in the Military Madhouse'' (1979)
* ''
The Panther Squad'' (1984)
* ''
Christina'' (1984)
* ''
Hanna D. - The Girl from Vondel Park'' (1984)
References
External links
*
*
*
*
The Sacrifice of Karin Schubert (The Grindhouse Effect)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schubert, Karin
1944 births
Living people
German film actresses
German pornographic film actresses
Spaghetti Western actresses
Actresses from Hamburg