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By Paul Majendie

FRANKFURT, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Legendary German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, reflecting at the age of 98 on her tempestuous life, said on Thursday she had only worked for Adolf Hitler for seven months and she wished she had never met him.

Imprisoned after World War Two and shunned by the mainstream film world for half a century, she said: ``I have learned to live with it. My life is nearly over. It is not so important.''

At a news conference to launch a new pictorial biography of her many careers, the immaculately coiffed filmmaker said: ``I am 98 years old now. In my whole life I only worked for Hitler for seven months.''

Asked if she cursed the day she met Hitler and wished she had gone instead to the United States to work as an actress, she said: ``Yes. Naturally. I would be happy if I had done this.''

Riefenstahl won critical acclaim for her film ``Triumph of the Will'' in 1934, about an epic Nazi Party rally, and ``Olympia'' about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler used those powerful films to propagate the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy.

After the end of the war, she was jailed for four years for her contributions to Nazi propaganda. That, to Riefenstahl, was richly ironic. ``Suddenly I am the criminal after the war, and before, I won prizes.''

``Ninety percent of what has been written about me has been made up,'' she told reporters in an exchange that stirred deep emotions among both her detractors and her defenders.

Denies Employing Gypsy Prisoners

In particular, she fiercely denied that in her film ``Tiefland'' she employed gypsies from concentration camps.

``I could kill those people who wrote those big lies about me,'' she said. ``The gypsies that were involved in the film were my friends who wrote me letters afterwards.''

The glossy book ``Leni Riefenstahl -- Five Lives'' drew on previously unpublished pictures from her private archives and illustrated her five careers as a dancer, actress, filmmaker, photographer and deep-sea diver.

They ranged from her famous photographs of the Nuba tribes in Sudan to luscious underwater photography, which she only took up at the age of 71.

She said she had never been a member of the Nazi Party and that Hitler never wanted her to make her epochal film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics where Jesse Owens (news - web sites), an African-American sprinter, was the big gold medal star.

``He didn't want to see the black people winning,'' she said, noting that Hitler came to the Games every day to encourage German athletes to land more medals.

She said Hollywood star Jodie Foster had approached her about making a film about her life. Negotiations fell through when Riefenstahl failed to win an assurance that she would have the final say on the final cut.

Feisty, determined and alert, she answered a flood of questions from reporters and faced a barrage of flashing cameras without blinking. ``I am used to this from the beginning of my career as a dancer through to being a film actress,'' she said.

Reuters/Variety