An actress who once shared the screen with Elvis Presley has died aged 82.

Christa Lang has dies aged 82 (Image: A los 82 años)

A Hollywood starlet who shared the screen with music icon Elvis Presley and screen legend Anthony Hopkins has passed away aged 82, her family has confirmed. Christa Lang, the German-born actress and producer who once worked opposite Elvis in the film Charro! before becoming a key creative force alongside director Samuel Fuller, died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. Her death was announced by her daughter, filmmaker Samantha Fuller, who said Christa passed away following what was described to The Hollywood Reporter as a brief period of declining health.

Born Christa Langewiesche in December 1943 in Winterberg, Germany, she was raised in postwar Essen. At 17, she left Germany for France, working as an au pair for the Toulouse-Lautrec family while modelling and saving money to study acting. During her early years in Paris, she also sat as an art model for renowned sculptor Paul Belmondo, the father of actor Jean-Paul Belmondo. Paris in the early 1960s placed Christa at the centre of the French New Wave.

The star shared the screen with music icon Elvis Presley and screen legend Anthony Hopkins (Image: Getty)

She formed friendships with filmmakers and artists, including Roger Vadim, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, while appearing in Vadim’s Circle of Love (1964), Chabrol’s Code Name: Tiger (1964) and Godard’s cult classic Alphaville (1965), which starred Anna Karina.

Also in Paris at the time was Samuel Fuller, the daring American filmmaker who had acted in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.

The pair met in Montmartre, with that first encounter later leading to a lifelong personal and professional partnership.

After Samuel returned to the United States, he paid for Christa’s one-way, first-class ticket to join him. They married in 1967 — the same year she worked alongside her teenage idol, Elvis Presley, in Charro!

From that point on, Christa became closely entwined with Samuel’s work.

She went on to portray a rebellious German countess in the World War II epic The Big Red One (1980) and a nurse in White Dog (1980). She was also his producing partner at their company, Chrisam Films.

Alongside her film work, Christa pursued academic ambitions, enrolling in a French Literature programme at UCLA and graduating with a master’s degree a few years later.

In 1975, she gave birth to Samantha. Just nine months later, mother and daughter appeared together on screen alongside Anthony Hopkins in the 1976 NBC telefilm The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case.

The family relocated to Paris in 1981 to pursue European film projects for Samuel and remained there until 1995. Before returning to the US, Christa and Samuel travelled to Brazil to meet Karaja Indigenous communities in the Amazon jungle for the 1994 documentary Tigrero.

After Samuel’s death in October 1997, aged 85, Christa focused on safeguarding his legacy. She oversaw the editing and publication of his autobiography, A Third Face, in 2002, and later produced the 2013 documentary A Fuller Life, directed by Samantha.

Her final on-screen appearance was filmed last year for an upcoming documentary examining Samuel’s last feature, Street of No Return.

Christa is survived by her daughter, Samantha, and her granddaughter, Samira.