THE German screen goddess Marlene Dietrich, a reclusive insomniac during the last years of her life, transformed herself from a publicity hungry film star into a very private night-time poet, it was revealed yesterday.

Behind the doors of a Paris hotel room, Dietrich would use Noël Coward’s old portable typewriter to tap out poems to dead lovers including Ernest Hemingway and Yul Brynner, as well as fellow stars such as Ronald Reagan.

Dietrich died in 1992, aged 90. “Thirteen years after her death, the discovery of these poems is nothing short of a sensation,” Peter Zander, the film critic of Die Welt newspaper, said. “It is a late opportunity, a chance we thought we would never get, of explaining the last years of splendid isolation of a great legend.”

Dietrich’s only child, Maria Riva, found the poems in a battered leather suitcase, and edited them.

She said that publishing the poems — some scribbled on scraps of paper — would show that her mother did not retreat from the public gaze because of vanity, as some biographers have claimed. “My mother withdrew because she was simply tired of being Marlene Dietrich,” Ms Riva said. “She was tired of the endless effort to present an ideal of perfection even though she was not perfect.”

Dietrich wrote at night, unable to sleep, sometimes reading out her thoughts on the telephone to her daughter in Palm Springs, California. “Would you let me sleep, please,” reads one poem. “I lead the most miserable of lives without you, so please at least let me sleep.”

She addresses a whole parade of Hollywood directors, stars, novelists and singers. Many were connected with the films that made her great, from the The Blue Angel to A Foreign Affair.

Dietrich’s lovers included the actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Brynner and Jean Gabin, the American novelist Hemingway, the German author Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, and the director Joseph Von Sternberg, as well as women including Mercedes de Acosta.

The poems offer some tantalising hints, as do the few scribbled notes. And there are a few surprises: she writes a strikingly sad poem to Reagan who she met in Hollywood.

Until now there has been no suggestion that they had an affair, yet the old lonely actress writes to her ageing friend as if they had been very emotionally close. “What a fate,” she writes to the former President. “Too late — cried the Raven, too late.”

She is sometimes skittish, imitating Hemingway’s laconic style in a poem to him: “Losing you feels like a fisherman feels who loses his catch . . .” There are brief, playful moments, such as her mockery of the Oscars ceremony: “With Henry Fonda/ I wonda/ How you got away/ With this sordid,/ Morbid bit.”

Mainly, though, the mood is heavy and the voice that of a woman nearing the end of her life. To the dead Orson Welles, another admirer, she writes: “Even when you are dead/ You are not safe,/ Not out of reach.”

MARLENE'S NIGHT THOUGHTS

To Noel Coward:
No more Body / To hold on to / While you Sleep / Just the Sheet. What a cheat!

To Ernest Hemingway:
Losing you / Feels like A fisherman feels / Who loses his catch He thought he had / So securely / Hooked / While piercing / The gills of his prey

To Ronald Reagan:
A tense silence / Grips me Surrounds me / Grounds me to the / Messy floor Around me / No voice No wind No rain Just silence will remain / Around me What a fate / "Too late cried the Raven, Too late"

Star of stage and screen who became US citizen

She died in Paris on May 6, 1992, aged 90. Her service attracted 3,500 mourners and she was buried in Berlin

Times Recommends

• Air crash: ‘Everything is burnt. It is the closest thing to Hell’
• The true story of a passionate Korean 'spy'
• I shot Lennon in the back, Chapman tells parole board