A GERMAN film actress, model, photographer and DJ who fell in love with the county she settled in has left a legacy to Dorset Community Foundation to support its work.

Renate Morley, of Milner Road, Bournemouth, died on Christmas Eve 2021, aged 85 after a long illness. Friends said she lived a long, colourful life, full of excitement, creativity and love.

Her estate has been left to the community foundation, which is Dorset’s largest county-based funder of grass roots charities and voluntary groups. In the last financial year it awarded more than £1.9 million in grants and worked with organisations including BCP and Dorset councils, the NHS and the National Community Lottery.

Renate’s close friend, Austrian Walter Hell-Höflinger, who met her while staying in Dorset in 1984, said she was born in East Germany but fled to the West in the late 1960s with her mother by swimming across a river in the dead of winter.

She became a film and theatre actress and toured Switzerland with a theatre company. In 1970 she won a German Film Academy Award in Gold for her role in the film Interview.

She later met British journalist John Morley and eventually moved to his home town of Bournemouth and they were married at the Lutheran Church in Southbourne. John, who died in 2010, was known locally for being a fierce advocate of North American Native Americans, having spent 17 years living with the Iroquois tribe in Canada.

“I met them because I was at a language school in Southbourne when I was 14 but I didn’t like the food where I was staying,” said Walter. “A friend at the school was staying with Renate and John and he bought me home to eat the good German food she made.

“I got on very well with them and spent a lot of time with them. I came back to stay with them twice more and kept in touch with her.”

She wanted to give to people, to empower people helping themselves

He said she told him stories from her youth. “Renate had a very colourful life right from when she was young,” he said. “She told me how she’d been a model and had once worked as a DJ in Switzerland where she was in a glass bubble above the dance floor. She had lots of amazing stories.”

He said she and John started a wedding photography business in Bournemouth, Wedding Masters, and Renate photographed more than 500 weddings.

She continued to work as an actress into her late 70s. “She got more successful with her character roles when she was older,” said Walter. “She was very capable of giving very hard facial expressions, which actually could frighten people.”

He said he is not surprised she left her estate to the community foundation. “She was a very kind person,” he said. “She wanted to give to people, to empower people helping themselves. She was very determined and encouraged people not to give up. Giving up was never an option for her and so she fought until her late age to stay working as an actress.”

Dorset Community Foundation Chief Executive Grant Robson said: “It is wonderful that someone as dedicated to Dorset as Renate should be remembered in this way. Her legacy will ensure her name lives on, not just through all of the friends and colleagues who loved and admired her but through the work to make life better for thousands of people that she is funding.

“We are seeing more and more people thinking about leaving us a legacy as an enduring memorial and we are happy to speak to anyone about it so they too can build something lasting in their name.”

More on leaving a legacy with Dorset Community Foundation here.