German film actress, model, photographer and DJ Renate Morley left a gift in her will that will continue to support the community she loved.
Renate, of Milner Road, Bournemouth, died on Christmas Eve 2021, aged 85 after a long illness. Friends said she lived a long, colourful life, full of excitement, creativity and love.
Her estate has been left to Dorset Community Foundation to support its work with grass roots charities and voluntary groups.
Renate’s close friend, Austrian Walter Hell-Höflinger, who met her while staying in Dorset in 1984, said she was born in East Germany but fled to the West in the late 1960s with her mother by swimming across a river in the dead of winter.
She became a film and theatre actress and toured Switzerland with a theatre company. In 1970 she won a German Film Academy Award in Gold for her role in the film Interview.
She later met British journalist John Morley and eventually moved to and fell in love with his home town of Bournemouth. They were married at the Lutheran Church in Southbourne. John, who died in 2010, was known locally for being a fierce advocate of North American Native Americans, having spent 17 years living with the Iroquois tribe in Canada.
Walter said Renate often shared stories from her youth. “She had a very colourful life right from when she was young,” he said. “She told me how she’d been a model and had once worked as a DJ in Switzerland where she was in a glass bubble above the dance floor. She had lots of amazing stories.”
He said she and John started a wedding photography business in Bournemouth, Wedding Masters, and Renate photographed more than 500 weddings.
She continued to work as an actress into her late 70s. “She got more successful with her character roles when she was older,” said Walter. “She was very capable of giving very hard facial expressions, which actually could frighten people.”
He said he is not surprised she left her estate to the community foundation. “She was a very kind person,” he said. “She wanted to give to people, to empower people helping themselves. She was very determined and encouraged people not to give up.
“Giving up was never an option for her and so she fought until her late age to stay working as an actress.”
Pictured: German actress Renate Morley in Dorset, the county she came to love