Charity | Posted on May 16th, 2025 | return to news
German film actress leaves legacy to Dorset Community Foundation
Renate Morley, a German film actress, model, photographer and DJ who lived in Bournemouth has left her estate to Dorset Community Foundation.
A German film actress, model, photographer and DJ who fell in love with Dorset has left her estate to Dorset Community Foundation to support its work.
Renate Morley, who lived on Milner Road, Bournemouth, died on Christmas Eve 2021 at age 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 foundation, which is Dorset’s largest county-based funder of grass roots charities and voluntary groups. It awarded more than £1.9m in grants in the last financial year.
According to her close friend Walter Hell-Höflinger, Renate 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 for her role in the film ‘Interview’.
Renate later met British journalist John Morley and moved to his hometown of Bournemouth. They were married at the Lutheran Church in Southbourne. John died in 2010. He was known for being a fierce advocate of North American Native Americans, having spent 17 years living with the Iroquois tribe in Canada.
Hell-Höflinger first met the couple in Dorset in 1984. He said: “I was at a language school in Southbourne when I was 14 but I didn’t like the food where I was staying.
“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.”
Renate told him about several 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.”
She and John started a wedding photography business in Bournemouth, Wedding Masters, and Renate photographed more than 500 weddings. She also continued to work as an actress into her late 70s. “She got more successful with her character roles when she was older,” said Hell-Höflinger. “She was very capable of giving very hard facial expressions, which actually could frighten people.”
He added that he was not surprised Renate left her estate to charity. “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.”
To find out more about Dorset Community Foundation, visit dorsetcommunityfoundation.org.
Please share post:
LATEST NEWS:
CHARITY OF THE YEAR 2025
Subscribe to the online magazine news letter
