Great European Lives

Born into privilege she may have been, but Anastasia’s short life and awful death remain one of the great tragedies of the 20th century

Sold as the most exciting thing to come out of Europe since the Sex Pistols, his hedonistic lifestyle halted his momentum

For all life threw at her, the writer never lost the last sliver of an innocence battered irreparably by events outside her control

With his “music that doesn't disturb” the German became one of the biggest-selling recording artists in Europe

The overriding atmosphere of Loti’s output is one of a lost innocence, a yearning nostalgia for a world before the corrupting influence of Europe

So significant was her contribution to Italian film that it led to the addition of a word to the Italian dictionary: borellismo

Wherever she went, the breakout role which made her name always seemed to be at her shoulder

The Austrian’s life was defined by a single event lasting 55 seconds

Nightmares were the business of Hans Ruedi Giger, who drew on his own to create surrealist art – and the creature at the heart of Alien

The German was behind some of the greatest war images ever taken by some of the best news photographers ever to wield a Leica

The Dutch cyclist should have fallen to his death after tumbling into a 1,000-foot ravine during the 1951 Tour de France, but emerged in miraculously good shape

The Red Baron shot down a total of 80 allied aircraft in a flying career that made his name immortal both in aerial combat and the history of aviation itself

John Huston and Jean-Paul Sartre came together to create a film based on the life of Sigmund Freud, but the project was scuppered by irreconcilable creative differences

The German-born artist created his melancholy and nightmarish Europe After the Rain II during the most frightening and uncertain period of his own life

The diminutive Italian actress, star of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, was more than a match for her husband, director Federico Fellini, on and off set

She was that rarest of dancers, one who could apparently transcend physics and the limitations of the human body

The remarkable career of the Spanish republican soldier who stumbled into the film industry

After decades of success in the US and Europe, the Russian composer suffered an ignominious demise in 1950s Moscow

The Ukrainian-American was forward thinking in his willingness to combine art with the world of science and engineering

He was born into a farming family, but it was always the agricultural machinery rather than the land itself that fascinated the young Ferruccio

Some credited him for paving the way for the nouvelle vague, but the Frenchman seemed to be content being known for his wives

One scene, for which she was not prepared, defined the career of an actress who never wanted to be a star

Nothing in the life of Alexandra, Princess of Greece and Denmark, Queen of Yugoslavia, was ever truly her own

The Russian always insisted she could never envision a life without dancing

The French director's obsessive desire for perfection proved ultimately self-destructive

The riptide of 20th century politics had pulled him from his homeland and set him adrift. A tumultuous period that soon defined his work

In death as well as in life, the Rasputin story is shrouded in an awed mythology

His was acting of remarkable subtlety and nuance, especially when sharing the screen with some of cinema’s most magnetic women

The Dane had a reputation as a vamp but in truth was as fragile as a gazelle

The German spent a lifetime seeking a creative place as far as possible from the vivid horrors of his past

The Italian's conducting was so intense a friend swore he'd seen a white glow around him

Nobody stuck a poster of Niels Bohr, wild-haired and with his tongue out, on their wall, but the Dane did as much for expanding the range of scientific knowledge in the modern age as Albert Einstein