Romy Schneider was a German-French actress. She is regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses of all time and became a cult figure due to her role as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the Sissi trilogy in the mid-1950s. She later reprised the role in a more mature version in Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1973). She began her career in the German Heimatfilm genre in the early 1950s when she was 15. Schneider moved to France, where she made successful and critically acclaimed films with some of the most notable film directors of that era. Her performance in That Most Important Thing: Love is regarded as one of the greatest in the history of cinema.Coco Chanel called Romy “the ultimate incarnation of the ideal woman.” Bertrand Tavernier remarked: “Sautet is talking about Mozart with regard to Romy. Me, I want to talk of Verdi, Mahler…”

Sissi is a 1955 Austrian historical romance film written and directed by Ernst Marischka and starring Romy Schneider, Karlheinz Böhm, Magda Schneider, Uta Franz, Gustav Knuth, Josef Meinrad, Vilma Degischer and Peter Weck. Sissi is the first installment in the trilogy of films about Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who was known to her family as "Sisi". It was followed by The Young Empress and Fateful Years of an Empress.