Karin Schubert

Karin Schubert — Biography

Karin Schubert began in German cinema, but the German actress did most of her work in Italian genre films. In France she is best remembered as the Queen of Spain in Gérard Oury's La Folie des grandeurs, while in Italy she stood out in productions such as Compañeros and Black Emanuelle. She later moved into erotic cinema and ended her acting career in 1994.

Born in Hamburg, she reached the screen in the late 1960s. Her early credits include the spaghetti western Compañeros (1970) and Oury's La Folie des grandeurs (1971); in 1972 she appeared in Edward Dmytryk's Bluebeard and, alongside Edwige Fenech, in the sex comedy Ubalda, All Naked and Warm. She then turned to adventure films with George Eastman: The Three Musketeers of the West (1973) Rudeness (1975) and Missile X: The Neutron Bomb Incident (1978), where she played a Russian agent opposite Peter Graves and Curd Jürgens.

In 1975 she gained attention with Black Emanuelle, starring Laura Gemser; it caught the eye of director Joe d'Amato, and she began appearing in his erotic films. In Emanuelle Around the World (1977) she played Cora Norman, Gemser's counterpart. As acting work dried up in the mid-1980s she moved to Spain but could not establish herself there. From 1985 she took roles in hardcore films, made mostly in Italy and West Germany, and continued in that field until 1994.