Thiess began her career on the stage in her native Germany and by dubbing female voices in American films as Ursula Schmidt. After she married Georg Otto Thiess, she became Ursula Thiess and was featured in many German magazines, including several cover photos, as well as the cover of Life magazine, 1954, as an up-and-coming model, and she was dubbed the "most beautiful woman in the world." She left postwar Germany at the urging of Howard Hughes and signed with RKO. She co-starred with Robert Stack in The Iron Glove (1952), Rock Hudson in Bengal Brigade (1954), Glenn Ford in The Americano (1955), and Robert Mitchum in Bandido (1956).
Ursula was born in 1924 to Wilhelmine Lange and Hans Schmidt. At age 17, for refusing to join the League of German Girls, she was drafted into service working as farm laborer. After that, she returned to do acting on stage, where she met and married her first husband, German film producer Georg Otto Thiess. They had two children, Manuela and Michael. That marriage dissolved in 1947, and in 1948, she began a modeling career in Berlin. Her unusual beauty caught the eye of Howard Hughes, who made her a contract offer to join RKO Studios.
She met Robert Taylor in 1952, and they married on May 23, 1954, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She virtually abandoned her film career to become a mother and housewife. The Taylors had two children Terrance "Terry" (b. June 18, 1955, in Santa Monica, California) and Tessa (b. August 16, 1959, in Santa Monica). They moved with Ursula's two children from her previous marriage, to their 114-acre (0.46 km2) ranch in Brentwood, California, in 1956, and lived there until Taylor's death from cancer in 1969. Ursula's two children, Manuela and Michael, had many adjustment problems adapting to their new life, and were often in trouble with the police, causing the family to suffer bad publicity as a result. Her son, Michael, who had served a year in a German prison for attempting to poison his natural father, died of a drug overdose on May 26, 1969, shortly before Robert Taylor's own death. Ursula discovered him dead when she stopped by his motel to drop off some medication for him.

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