page_title: Maria Riva
section_title: Acting career
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Riva / Biography / Acting career
caption_attribution_description: English: Herbert Berghof &amp; Maria Riva in the U.S. TV series Suspense, episode Death Drum (cropped screenshot)
context_page_description: Maria Elisabeth Riva is an American actress, writer and activist. She worked on television in the 1950s. She is the daughter of actress Marlene Dietrich, about whom she published a memoir in 1992.
context_section_description: At the age of 15, Riva received acting training at the Max Reinhardt Academy and during the Second World War entertained Allied troops in Europe for the USO from 1945–46, stationed in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In the early 1940s, she briefly went by the stage name of 'Maria Manton'. She also acted in theatre and summer stock, including a production of Tea and Sympathy. She appeared at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway in the 1954 production The Burning Glass, opposite Cedric Hardwicke and Walter Matthau.
  A brief marriage to Dean Goodman—whom she married in 1943—ended in divorce. Then she married scenic designer William Riva in 1947; they had four sons. With the birth of her first child, J. Michael Riva in 1948, the press dubbed Dietrich "the world's most glamorous grandmother". Her second son, Peter Riva, president and owner of International Transactions, Inc., is her literary agent.
  In the early years of television, the major television networks of the time tried to build their own stable of actors in the same fashion as the film studios. In 1951, Riva was signed to CBS as a contract player receiving a salary of $250 per week.
  Whilst under contract to CBS, Riva not only acted in television productions, but also appeared in commercials, she appeared in television commercials promoting Alcoa, as well as appearing in print advertisements for Rheingold Beer.
  During the 1950s, Riva appeared in more than 500 live teleplays for CBS, all broadcast from New York, including The Milton Berle Show, Lux Video Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Your Show of Shows and Studio One. She received Emmy nominations as best actress in both 1952 and 1953.
  In a January 1953 issue of Motion Picture Daily, Riva was named as one of 'Television's Best of 1952' alongside fellow television stars such as Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, Dinah Shore, Kate Smith and more.
  In 1962, having retired from acting, Riva moved to Bern, Switzerland with her husband and four sons, dividing her time between a home in New York purchased for her by her mother in 1948, and their home in Switzerland. Riva then devoted much of the 1960s to organizing her mother's one-woman shows.
  Riva made a cameo appearance as Mrs. Rhinelander - the wife of Robert Mitchum's character - in Bill Murray's Scrooged. In 2001, she was interviewed for Her Own Song, a documentary about her mother. In June 2012, her son Michael died, aged 63, following a stroke.
  In 2018, Riva returned to acting, starring in a short-film entitled 'All Aboard', directed by her grandson J. Michael Riva, Jr.
caption: Herbert Berghof and Riva in an episode of the television series Suspense
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