Marlene Dietrich, the magnetic movie star and singer who was an international symbol of glamour and sex for more than half a century, died yesterday at her home in Paris. She was 90 years old. In her films and record-breaking cabaret performances, Miss Dietrich artfully projected cool sophistication, self-mockery and infinite experience. Her sexuality was audacious, her wit was insolent and her manner was ageless. With a world-weary charm and a diaphanous gown showing off her celebrated legs, she was the quintessential cabaret entertainer of Weimar-era Germany. The Dietrich image, personified by Lola-Lola, the seductive cabaret singer in top hat and silk stockings whom she portrayed in "The Blue Angel," was that of a liberated woman of the world who chose her men, earned her own living and viewed sex as a challenge. Audiences were captivated by this creature out of no one's experience but out of everyone's imagination. 'Most Vulnerable Fantasies' Her manner, the critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, was that of "a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies." "She has sex but no positive gender," Tynan wrote. "Her masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men." Her friend Maurice Chevalier said: "Dietrich is something that never existed before and may never exist again. That's a woman." The Dietrich image was born in the Berlin of the 1920's, when she appeared in plays, cabaret, and film roles of varying importance (she was an extra in G. W. Pabst's 1925 "Joyless Street," which featured Greta Garbo). Her mentor, the American director Josef von Sternberg, made her an international star with "The Blue Angel," which was filmed in 1930 in both German and English. Although in the movie's offstage scenes her 5-foot-5-inch frame seemed a bit blowzy and her manner a bit too Teutonic, her portrayal of Lola-Lola, who degrades and destroys an infatuated elderly professor (Emil Jannings), won her a Hollywood contract. She shed 30 pounds, and in six more von Sternberg movies the director and his star molded the legend. Her hair became a golden blond, makeup and lighting made her cheekbones and nose appear patrician, and her dreamy blue eyes were framed by thinly penciled, sweepingly arched brows. Perhaps the best description of her face was provided by Erich Maria Remarque, her longtime friend, in his novel "Arch of Triumph": "The cool, bright face that didn't ask for anything, that simply existed, waiting -- it was an empty face, he thought; a face that could change with any wind of expression. One could dream into it anything. It was like a beautiful empty house waiting for carpets and pictures. It had all possibilities -- it could become a palace or a brothel." A Lifelong Task Of Creating an Image Working with von Sternberg, the actress became a thorough professional and perfectionist, expert in makeup, lighting, clothes and film editing. In later decades, she repeatedly had cosmetic surgery to keep her face taut, and adroitly had herself filmed with soft-focus, gauze-covered lenses. "Glamour," she observed, "is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it." In clothes, she was a trend setter. Both on screen and off, she often wore trousers and mannish costumes. By proving that a woman could still look feminine in such clothes, she established "the Dietrich silhouette," emphasizing trimness and inconspicuous hips and bust. The Dietrich-von Sternberg collaboration produced "Morocco" (1930), in which Miss Dietrich, again a cabaret singer, spurns and then pursues a French legionnaire (Gary Cooper) in the Sahara; "Dishonored" (1931), about a spy who betrays her country for love of a worthless man (Victor McLaglen), and "Shanghai Express" (1932), a melodrama in which she is a China Coast prostitute who offers herself to a warlord (Warner Oland) to save the life of a former lover (Clive Brook).