Six-foot-three and weighing in at a lean, mean 215, Michael Forest was a rugged-looking addition to the Roger Corman and Gene Corman’s list of leading men during their 1950s heyday. Between Corman films, he was a stage actor who worked in Shakespearean plays and other legitimate productions as classy as his real name (Gerald Michael Charlebois). Born in Harvey, North Dakota, he moved with his family at a very early age to Seattle, attended the University of Washington for a year and then made his way south to the sunnier campuses of San Jose State. Graduating with a B.A. in English and drama, Forest came to Hollywood in 1955 and started acting on TV and on stage at the Players Ring. In 1957, he began to study with veteran actor/acting teacher Jeff Corey, in whose classes Forest first encountered Roger Corman. Forest has also worked extensively on TV and European films.
France Nuyen was born in Marseille. Her mother was French and during World War II, her mother and grandfather were persecuted by the Nazis for being Roma.
Nuyen was raised in Marseille by a cousin she calls “an Orchidaceae raiser who was the only person who gave a damn about me.” Having left school at the age of 11, she began studying art and became an artist’s model
In 1955, while working as a seamstress, Nuyen was discovered on the beach by Lifephotographer Philippe Halsman. She was featured on the cover of 6 October 1958 issue of Life
France Nuyen became a motion picture actress in 1958. In her first role, she appeared as Liat, daughter of Bloody Mary (played by Juanita Hall) in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
France Nuyen worked several times with actor William Shatner. At age 19, she was cast in Shatner’s 1958 Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong. The play ran for more than 500 performances and was quite financially successful. Both Nuyen and Shatner later collected notable accolades for their work on the show, at the 1959 Theatre World Awards.
Ms Nuyen worked again with Shatner across three US television projects, starting with “Elaan of Troyius“, a 1968 third season episode of the original Star Trek in which Nuyen was the title character. She would later appear with Shatner in the 1973 made for TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet, and afterward in a 1974 episode of the Kung Fu.
France Nuyen was married to Thomas Gaspar Morell, a psychiatrist from New York, by whom she has a daughter, Fleur, who resides in Canada and works as a film make-up artist. She met her second husband, Robert Culp, while appearing in four episodes of his television series I Spy. They married in 1967, but divorced three years later. In 1986, Nuyen earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and began a second career as a counselor for abused women, children and women in prison. She received a Woman of the Year award in 1989 for her psychology work. In the Life cover story on Nuyen, she is quoted as saying a proverb she also repeated in character as a spy in the I Spy episode “Magic Mirror”: “I am Chinese. I am a stone. I go where I am kicked.”
She resides in California.
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Taina Elg is one of the few actresses who hail from Finland to star in Hollywood films. She was born in Helsinki in 1930. She trained originally as a ballet dancer. She joined the Sadler Welles Ballet company in London. She was noticed by an American film producer and offered a Hollywood contract. Her first U.S. film was “The Prodigal” with Edmund Purdom and Lana Turner in 1955. She made a number of other films for MGM including “Gaby” and “Diane”. She went on to star with Kay Kendall, Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor in “Les Girls” amusical with songs by Cole Porter. She then went to Britain to film the remake of “The 39 Steps” with Kenneth More. Her film career waned somewhat during the early 1960’s and she acted more frequently on stage and on television. Her son is the famous jazz guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim. Interview with Taina Elg on “Finland Center” website here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
One of her country’s most celebrated performers, Finnish actress and dancer Taina Elg was born in 1931 in Impilahti, in Southeastern Finland (located near the Finnish/Russian border). Her home later became a target during the Finnish-Soviet wars between 1939 and 1944 and when it became part of the Soviet Union, the family was forced to leave.
At a very young age, she began her training in ballet and acting. When the family moved to Helsinki, Taina continued with her dance and acting training and eventually was invited to join the Finnish National Ballet. She appeared in a few homeland movies as early as age 10 and found a couple of obscure film roles as a teenager, one in which she danced.
Taina’s international reputation began to grow when she joined the famed Sadler’s Wells ballet dance company (The Royal Ballet) in London and then the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, in Paris. A serious injury forced her to rethink her dancing career. Fortunately, she was discovered in London by American film producer Edwin H. Knopf and, on the heels of the spectacular Hollywood success fellow Scandinavian Anita Ekberg was having, MGM decided to sign Taina for a seven-year Hollywood contract.
She made her American debut for MGM with the secondary role of Elissa in the Lana Turner biblical costumer The Prodigal (1955). The following year MGM utilized her acting talents in their films Diane (1956), again starring Ms. Turner, and Gaby (1956) withLeslie Caron. For the afore-mentioned work she was honored with a Golden Globe award for female “foreign newcomer”.
Taina was subsequently handed her best all-around opportunity by MGM to display her sublime dancing, sexy figure and comedic acting skills when asked to portray Angèle Ducros in Cole Porter‘s musical Les Girls (1957) opposite Gene Kelly and alongside fellow dazzlers Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall. Receiving her second consecutive Golden Globe (tying with Kendall) for “Best Actress” in a musical, Les Girls (1957) also won the Golden Globe for “Best Picture – Musical” and an Oscar for its costume design.
Ms. Elg’s Hollywood film career went into a steep decline at this juncture and she began focusing on TV projects, foreign films and especially theatre roles. Appearing on stage in such 1960s productions as “Redhead,” “Silk Stockings,” “Irma La Douce,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music” and “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” she finally made her Broadway debut with the musical “Look to the Lilies” in 1970, which was based on the Oscar-winning film Lilies of the Field (1963).
Her love for the stage was obvious and she remained as colorful than ever gracing such musicals as Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” (1973) in which she sang the haunting “Send in the Clowns.” She also returned to Broadway in later years with the musicals “Where’s Charley?”, for which she earned a Tony nomination, “Nine” and “Cabaret”. She appeared in the national tour of the musical “Titanic” in 1998-1999. On the non-musical stage she had strong roles in “Uncle Vanya,” “I Hate Hamlet” “O Pioneers!” and, more recently, “Requiem for William” and Memory of a Summer” (both 2003).
In 2004, the actress received a special honor from her native Finland, when she was knight by the Order of the Lion of Finland. She is a naturalized American citizen.
The jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is Taina’s son from her first marriage (1953-1958) to Carl “Poku” Björkenheim. In 1985 she was married to Rocco Caporale, an Italian educator and professor of sociology. The couple lived in New York City until his death in 2008.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
One of the last surviving French sex symbols from the Fifties and Sixties Mylène Demongeot has died at the age of 87 after a long illness.
Demongeot who spent her youth in Montpellier and adored the region around the town, latterly had devoted herself to animal rights in common with her contemporary Brigitte Bardot. Bardot wrote in one of her books that “Mylène was my little cinema sister, then became my combat sister, a libra like me, she has always loved animals”.
After the death of her long-standing companion Didier Raoult, the actress had her own battles with cancer and recently coronavirus against which she had declined to be vaccinated, claiming to have multiple allergies.
Despite more than her fair share of adversity she kept working and recently appeared in such popular box office hits as Retirement Home (Maison de Retraite) by Thomas Gilou, playing opposite Gérard Depardieu; Camping 3 by Fabien Onteniente with Claude Brasseur, and The Midwife (Sage Femme by Martin Provost) with Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve.
The daughter of a French father and Ukrainian mother the actress made an early impression in Raymond Rouleau’s production of The Witches Of Salem alongside Simone Signoret and Yves Montand.
She was taken up and promoted by photographer Henri Coste with whom she learned to pose for the camera and who later became her first husband.
Demongeot was born in Nice in 1935 and appeared in more than 72 films in a career which spanned six decades. She was nominated for a Bafta award as most promising newcomer in 1957 for a Franco-German production of The Crucible, and was praised by the play’s author Arthur Miller as “bursting with real sexuality”.
She performed in such costume adventures as The Vengeance Of The Three Musketeers (1961) as Milady de Winter and in comedies, among them Fantômas (1964), directed by André Hunebelle, and its various sequels.
On the international arena notably she co-starred with David Niven in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse from the novel by Françoise Sagan (1958). In the UK she co-starred in several comedies, including It’s A Wonderful World (1956); Upstairs and Downstairs (1959) and Doctor in Distress (1963).
Demongeot was also nominated for César Awards for Best Supporting Actress in 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004) and La Californie . Her husband was Marc Simenon, the son of Maigret creator Georges Simenon..
In her later years she was conned out of her life-savings of some two million euros after a financial scare and only had survived by making drastic economies and living in a small flat in Paris. The anti-corruption squad eventually caught the culprit.
There have been some very famous mononymous persons – Cher, Sting, Björk, Plato – but of all of them, Capucine must have been the most beautiful. Blake Edwards, who directed her in The Pink Panther (1963), called her “part Mona Lisa. That smile”. Christian Dior, for whom she had modelled in Paris, was struck by her “old eyes, her eyes were impervious”.
These days, if you remember Capucine at all, it is probably from those Pink Panther films, in which she plays Inspector Clouseau’s wife, who can afford her conspicuous head-to-toe Yves Saint Laurent because she’s nicking jewels behind his back. (“On a police inspector’s salary! How many women could save enough out of the housekeeping to buy a mink coat?” asks the besotted Clouseau. “Well, it’s not easy!” she replies.)
The part of Madame Clouseau was also stolen, from Ava Gardner, who was dropped when she became too demanding. Capucine made a better mannequin for the outfits, not unexpectedly.
Born Germaine Lefebvre on the Côte d’Azur in 1928, she ran away to Paris as a teenager. There she became a couture model, discarded her dowdy name and met Audrey Hepburn, who would become her best friend. (She also once shared a cabin, as a cruise ship model in 1952, with a teenage nightclub dancer called Brigitte Bardot.)
Capucine is not thought a great actress – her co-star Laurence Harvey went so far as to call her “ghastly” – but she had a flair for physical comedy that was overlooked. Watch her in The Pink Panther strip off in the lift as her pursuers run up the stairs, so that she emerges (ding!) in total disguise, then grins with relief when she realises she’s fooled them. Capucine is good at switching from dignified to undignified and back again. The trouble is, she was very rarely required to.
Capucine in a publicity still for the 1960 John Wayne picture North to Alaska CREDIT:FOX/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Her point, as Hollywood saw it, was to fill the Grace Kelly slot after Kelly became actual royalty. In the words of William Goetz, the producer who gave Capucine her first lead, as the Russian princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, in a 1960 Dirk Bogarde vehicle: “You can teach a girl to act but nobody can teach her how to look like a princess. You’ve got to start with a girl who looks like a princess.”
This led to some frustrations. The press nicknamed her “the haughty heron”. In 1968, Capucine told an Italian magazine she wished she didn’t always have to be elegant, that she longed to play a “dishevelled woman”, but “since the directors know I was a model, it is obvious that they can’t see me as anything else.” In 1965, she told Time magazine: “Sometimes I feel I would like to cut loose and start throwing pies.”
Flair for physical comedy: Capucine stars alongside Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther (1963) CREDIT:UNITED ARTISTS/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
For someone intended to fill Grace Kelly’s Cinderella slippers, Capucine’s own life turned out to be very uncharmed. Beauty was her great strength, but it was also a limiting factor. “Men look at me like I’m a suspicious-looking trunk, and they’re customs agents,” she once said.
As she aged, she felt unable to present the façade required, and stopped going out. The parts for countesses and princesses dried up. The director Luchino Visconti turned her down for Tadzio’s mother in Death in Venice (1971), a part Bogarde was angling for her, because: “She has a horrible voice and too many teeth. She looks like a horse, a beautiful horse, I know that, I was a trainer. I know all about horses, but I don’t want a horse.”
Capucine, 1962 CREDIT: KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
None of this might have mattered, but Capucine was also a suicidal depressive. Hepburn saved her life when she took an overdose of pills, but in 1990 she threw herself from the roof of her Lausanne apartment block. If she hadn’t, she would have been 90 today. She left $100,000 apiece to Unicef and the Red Cross, in honour of Hepburn; her ashes were scattered by Givenchy.
When Capucine died, little was known of her for sure. Her obituaries couldn’t even agree on the number of cats she left behind. Partly this was a symptom of her having been looked at all her life, rather than listened to; partly it was to do with her habit of gently fictionalising her life as she went along (arch in interviews, which she found dull, she invented new dates of birth); partly because she rarely bothered to correct misinformation printed about her.
Capucine with Audrey Hepburn, 1972 CREDIT: REGINALD GRAY/PENSKE MEDIA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Gossip columnists tied her up in various romances – to the producer Charles K Feldman, to her co-stars William Holden and Bogarde (who said she was the only woman he could ever have married) – but it isn’t clear whether any of these “love affairs” were real. “What is social, they want to make seem sexual,” she told Boze Hadleigh, the Hollywood historian.
The truth is that Capucine, who played Barbara Stanwyck’s love interest in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and kissed Suzy Kendall on the lips – racy for the time – in Fräulein Doktor (1969), was bisexual off-screen, too. George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s valet, said she was one of the very few women who wouldn’t give Frank the time of day. Laurence Harvey, the male lead in Walk on the Wild Side, told her: “Kissing you is like kissing the side of a beer bottle.”
Racy for the time: starring alongside Suzy Kendall in Fräulein Doktor (1969) CREDIT: AVALA ITALY/KOBAL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
When Hadleigh interviewed Capucine for his book Hollywood Lesbians, she told him: “Most Americans think it’s either 100 per cent heterosexual or 100 per cent homosexual. It’s much more complex than that. Look at ancient Greece.” When asked if she would describe herself as heterosexual, she replied: “Oh, I wouldn’t. But if the publicity people would see a need to say that, I don’t care… most publicity is not true.”
Federico Fellini said of Capucine that “she had a face to launch a thousand ships… but she was born too late.” Perhaps. But would more recognition have made her happy? We will never know. Capucine was often described as “sphinx-like” in life, and now, in death, she really is
Sarah Biasini was born on July 21, 1977 in Gassin, Var, France as Sarah Magdalena Biasini. She is an actress, known for Blind Test (2010), Recon: A Filmmaker’s Quest(2012) and Suite noire (2009). She is the daughter of actors Daniel Biasini and Romy Schneider.
It wasn’t until 1974 that Vitali met Stanley Kubrick, with whom he would go on to have a professional relationship for the rest of Kubrick’s career. Vitali answered a casting call for Barry Lyndon and got the part of Lord Bullingdon, the title character’s stepson. Kubrick and Vitali bonded during the shoot. As filming concluded, Vitali asked Kubrick if he could stay on, without pay, to observe the editing process, to which Kubrick agreed[3]. Five years later, Kubrick sent Vitali a copy of Stephen King‘s The Shining and asked him to join the production of Kubrick’s next film, to which Vitali eagerly agreed. He is credited in The Shining (1980) as “personal assistant to director”.
In 1977 he portrayed Victor Frankenstein in Terror of Frankenstein, Calvin Floyd’s adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s classic Frankenstein, where he met his future wife Kersti Vitali, who worked as costume designer in the shoot. The Vitalis then worked as costume designers in Birgitta Svensson‘s Mackan, after which Leon played a bit part in Svensson’s next film, Inter Rail (1981). Leon and Kersti would divorce later on. Swedish actress Vera Vitali is their daughter. Masha Vitali is a second daughter. Max Vitali is their son.
Vitali teamed with Kubrick again for Full Metal Jacket (1987), where he served both as casting director and assistant to the director. Twelve years later, Vitali was credited with the same titles in working with Kubrick in what would be the director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in which Vitali also played the Red Cloak. The words “fashion designer Leon Vitali” also appear in the third column of the newspaper article that Tom Cruise’s character reads to learn about a former beauty queen’s hotel drugs overdose.
Since Kubrick’s death Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick’s films. In 2004, Vitali was honored with the Cinema Audio Society‘s President’s Award for this work.
In 2017, Vitali was the subject of a documentary, Filmworker, directed by Tony Zierra and screened at the London Film Festival in October 2017, in which he is interviewed at length about his work with Kubrick.[4] The film was broadcast by Film4 in the UK on 7 March 2019, followed by a showing of Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).
In 1999, Vitali and filmmaker Todd Field, with whom he appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, began discussing the possibility of making films together. Vitali is credited as “technical consultant” on Field’s In the Bedroom (2001), and as “associate producer” on Field’s Little Children (2006), where he also made a cameo appearance as “The Oddly Familiar Man”.
Pablito Calvo (real name Pablo Calvo Hidalgo) (16 March 1948 – 1 February 2000) was a Spanish child actor. After the international success of Marcelino, pan y vino, where he won a Cannes Film Festival award (1955), he became Spain’s most famous child actor. He did five more films, even in Italy, with Totò.
Retired from acting at the age of 16 to become an industrial engineer later, he worked in tourism and promoting buildings in Torrevieja. .In 1976 he married Juana Olmedo, with whom in 1979 he had a son, Pablito Jr. He died aged 52 of an aneurysm.
