European Actors Archives - Page 10 of 29

Frida Lyngstad of Abba

Frida Lyngstad was born in 1945 in Norway. She is part of the pop group Abba.

Extract from “Express” article: Out of all four of us, Frida had the most dramatic life. Her life is the classic rags-to-riches story,” he said last year. “I can just picture the scenes and the cliffhangers.”Her Serene Highness Princess Reuss, Countess of Plauen – to accord “the brunette one” from the Seventies’ most celebrated foursome her married titles – could hardly deny the truth of that statement.

As the illegitimate daughter of a Norwegian mother and a German soldier, conceived during the Nazi occupation of her homeland, she was lucky to escape incarceration in a mental institution. That was the fate which befell many innocent Norwegians who were the products of Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn programme which was designed to produce an Aryan master race. Frida avoided it thanks to the grandmother who whisked her to safety in Sweden.

Now wealthy thanks to her singing stardom and her marriage to a millionaire from a German royal house, she is a close friend of the Swedish royal family and spends her time doing international charity work. It was in that role that she apparently met Sir Alan West, as he then was, just after he had stepped down as Britain’s First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy.

She was born Anni-Frid Lyngstad near the port of Narvik, in the far north of Norway, in November 1945.

Fearing what the future might hold, Agny fled to Sweden with the baby. Synni followed shortly afterwards, taking a job as a waitress, but she fell ill and died of kidney failure aged only 21, before her daughter’s second birthday.

Brought up in Sweden by a distant grandmother, Frida had a lonely childhood.

“I didn’t have many friends,” she has recalled. “I thought everything about me was wrong – that there was nothing about me that was worth loving.”

She knew that her father was German but she had been told he had drowned at sea. It was only in 1977, when the publicity surrounding Abba enabled one of her estranged German relatives to put two and two together, that she realised Haase was still alive. They had a reunion but ceased contact in 1983.

“It would have been different if I’d been a child but it’s difficult to get a father when you’re 32 years old,” she said later. “I can’t really connect to him and love him the way I would have if he’d been around when I grew up.”

By that time she had been married and divorced twice. In 1963 she wed Ragnar Fredriksson, the bass player of her Swedish band the Anni-Frid Four. They had two children but she divorced him after she met keyboard player Benny Andersson (the bearded one from Abba). His composing partner Ulvaeus was engaged to a rising blonde singing star called Agnetha Faltskog and in 1970 a quartet was born called The Engaged Couples. That mutated to ABBA when their manager started referring to them by the initial letters of their names (although they needed first to negotiate with Sweden’s largest fish canning factory, also called Abba, which eventually wished them well and sent them a carton of tuna).

Soaring to success with victory in the 1973 Eurovision Song Contest, the clean-living foursome dominated the Seventies with their bubbly, white-jumpsuit schmaltz. They have sold more than 370 million records to date – winning a new popularity in the Nineties with their Abba Gold greatest hits album and the worldwide success of the spin-off musical Mamma Mia!

At the height of their fame, the engaged couples married but Frida and Benny were divorced in 1981, and after the break-up of Abba she left Sweden first for Britain and then for Switzerland, launching a solo career that failed to set the world on fire. Nowadays, she says her interest in music is “non-existent”.

In 1992, she married her long-time boyfriend, Prince Heinrich Ruzzo Reuss von Plauen, the part-Italian, part-Swedish head of a former German royal house, who was based in Switzerland. They had been living together in his castle at Fribourg, near Berne, since 1986. Educated in Sweden, the prince was a schoolfriend of King Carl Gustaf of Sweden, and he and Frida took to spending winter holidays with Carl Gustaf and his wife Queen Silvia. But the decade brought twin tragedies. In January 1998, Frida’s daughter Lise-Lotte was fatally injured in a car crash in the United States and less than two years later, in November 1999, Prince Ruzzo died of cancer after a six-month illness, aged just 49.

While her former bandmate Agnetha has become a recluse, hiding away on a thinly populated Swedish island, misfortune has not led Frida to shun the limelight. A grandmother and a staunch Green campaigner, she is a prominent supporter of the drug prevention charity Mentor and has attended charity functions such as one at London’s Natural History Museum last year, in the company of her friend Queen Silvia and Queen Noor of Jordan.

Frida, who now lives in the ultra-chic Swiss mountain resort of Zermatt.

Llona Massey was born in Budapest in 1910. She came to Hollywood ion 1937 and made movies such as “Rosalie” opposite Nelson Eddy, “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman” and in 1959 “Jet Over the Atlantic”. She died in 1974.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Sultry, opulent blonde Hungarian singer Ilona Massey survived an impoverished childhood in Budapest, Hungary to become a glamorous both here and abroad. As a dressmaker’s apprentice she managed to scrape up money together for singing lessons and first danced in chorus lines, later earning roles at the Staats Opera. A Broadway, radio and night-club performer, she appeared in a couple of Austrian features before coming to America to duet with Nelson Eddy in a couple of his glossy operettas. In the first, Rosalie(1937), she was secondary to Mr. Eddy and Eleanor Powell, but in the second vehicle,Balalaika (1939), she was the popular baritone’s prime co-star. Billed as “the new Dietrich,” Ms. Massey did not live up to the hype as her soprano voice was deemed too light for the screen and her acting talent too slight and mannered. She continued in non-singing roles in a brief movie career that included only 11 films. For the most part she was called upon to play sophisticated temptresses in thrillers and spy intrigues.Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and Love Happy (1949) with the four Marx Bros. are her best recalled. She appeared on radio as a spy in the Top Secret program and, on TV, co-starred in the espionage series Rendezvous (1952). In the mid-50s she had her own musical TV show in which she sang classy ballads. She became an American citizen in 1946. Married four times, once to actor Alan Curtis, Ms. Massey died of cancer in 1974.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.n

Ilona Massey

The great Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev was born in 1938 in Irkutsk. A famed dancer with the Kirov Ballet, he defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 and formed a highly successful ballet duo with Dame Margot Fonteyn. In the 1970’s be began making movies and hat the title role in Ken Russell’s “Valentino” in 1977 and “Exposed” in 1983. He died in 1993.

TCM overview:

One of the most celebrated dancers of the 20th century, Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev displayed an artistically expressive skill that combined classical ballet and modern dance and changed the perception of male ballet dancers. He was born on March 17, 1938 while his mother Feride was aboard a Trans-Siberian train. He spent most of childhood and youth in Ufa, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Bashkir. From his earliest days, the young Nureyev loved music. When his mother snuck him and his siblings to a performance featuring ballerina Zaituna Nasretdinova, it was the tipping point for Nureyev to pursue a life in dancing. He began taking dance lessons and eventually enrolled at the Kirov Ballet’s Leningrad Choreographic School in 1955 at the age of 17. He trained under the legendary ballet teacher Alexander Pushkin, who also taught Mikhail Baryshnikov. He quickly became a sensation in the Soviet Union, having danced 15 roles within his three years at the Kirov Ballet. However, the Soviet Union’s stifling protectiveness over one of its cultural icons became too much for the headstrong Nureyev. On June 16, 1961 Nureyev flew to Paris and defected from the Soviet Union. Now unfettered by the USSR’s communist regime, Nureyev signed up for the Grand Ballet du Marquis Cuevas and continued to tour all over Europe, which ensured that his career and recognition would turn international. He made his first appearance in the United Kingdom when he danced Poeme Tragique, a solo choreographed by renowned British dancer Frederick Ashton, and the Black Swan pas de deux. In 1962, The Royal Ballet founder Dame Ninette de Valois offered him to join her company as Principal Dancer; he stayed there until 1970. Aside from his numerous stage performances, Nureyev shared his elegant dance forms in several films. He made his screen debut in a film version of “Les Sylphides” (1962). Nureyev made his directorial debut in a film version of Sir Robert Helpmann’s production of “Don Quixote” (1972). Nureyev was one of the first guest stars of “The Muppet Show” (syndicated 1976-1981) when it was still a fledgling show, and his appearance was often credited with turning the Jim Henson series as one of the most sought after programs for other celebrities to appear in. In his later years, Nureyev was appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983, and continued to dance and teach younger dancers. Unfortunately, Nureyev was one of the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. He tested positive for HIV in 1984, but continued to remain active in the dance scene. He was allowed to return to his native country for the first time since his defection to visit his dying mother in 1987. Two years later, he was invited to dance the role of James in “La Sylphide.” As his illness began to enter its final and ultimately fatal stages, Nureyev began to suffer several medical problems. His last public appearance was on October 8, 1992 at the premiere of “La Bayadere” at Palais Garnier. Nureyev succumbed to his medical complications on January 6, 1993 at the age of 54. Although Nureyev’s life was tragically cut short, his influence on ballet and modern dance was an everlasting legacy.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Barry Joule’s obituary in “The Independent”:

HE LAST year was one long battle for Rudolf Nureyev, one which he fought with great bravery, writes Barry Joule.

At the beginning of the year, we saw him off from London to conduct in Vienna, and several other European stops, before a substantial tour in Russia. In mid-March he fell extremely ill in St Petersburg. Against the Russian doctors’ advice, and by sheer Tartar will-power, he forced himself out of hospital, on to a plane to Paris and home.

Dr Michel Canesi was for 10 years Rudolf’s doctor and friend. Canesi is one of France’s leading experts on Aids and affiliated with the private Hopital du Perpetual Secours in north Paris. It was here, from Spring 1992 until his death, between bursts of creativity and travel, that Rudolf was a regular patient under an assumed name, being treated for complications of HIV infection.

By mid-April he had rallied and, taking a nurse he liked, he left hospital to go to New York. Here he was to conduct Romeo and Juliette for the American Ballet Theatre. Saddled with two hours of medical treatment every morning, he still found time to learn the score and direct the company.

On 6 May, from the galleries of the Metropolitan Opera House confetti snowed down. The maestro had scored brilliantly; the New Yorkers always loved their favourite dancer from the time he and Margot Fonteyn stormed in in the Sixties. Rudolf never stayed to read his critique, but left for his farm in Virginia. Then it was back to Washington for a celebration and a plane south to his seaside bungalow on the French island of St Barthelemy. June saw him in San Francisco, New York, then back to Paris.

Only a handful of his closest friends knew of his debilitating affliction. Each day was more difficult, more of a drain on his enormous reservoirs of strength. In mid-July he went to the islands of Galli he owned south of Capri. Here, in the heat he adored, he was happiest.

By the beginning of August he had weakened a good deal, yet denied anything was really wrong. We went from Galli to Naples to pick up a brand new yacht which he had just bought, which was christened Tartara after the Prince of Dance.

At the beginning of September a helicopter was called to take him off the island. Back in Paris he received urgent medical treatment, and gamefully plunged into rehearsals for La Bayadere, which was set to open the Paris season in October. He was to choreograph and conduct one of his favourite ballets, which he had danced as a teenager at the Kirov. His old dancing partner from the Kirov Ninel Kourgapkina, 62, came over to assist him, and his Parisian friends rallied round to help.

In mid-September I moved into his apartment, opposite the Louvre, and stayed with him until after the Gala. The long days were arduous for this once superb athlete. There were medical treatments at home, trips to the hospital, pills to be swallowed around the clock, drips etc. But every night at 6pm sharp he somehow found the energy to go to the Opera.

He fell over on his first night, in front of the entire company. They were aghast, riveted to the spot, until he barked, ‘What are you looking at? Get on with it.’ A sofa was provided at the side of the stage and every night from this vantage point he watched, his searching eye never missing a detail. Everyone danced their hearts out; it was awe-inspiring to watch this great drama unfold. Rudolf was furious when Dr Canesi told me what we all knew: that he was too weak to conduct.

Exhausted, each night we returned home, where Rudolf would collapse into his bed. He was a complete professional to the tips of his powerful toes. I learnt this yet again when on 3 October his dearest friend, Maude Gosling, arrived from London. It was after midnight and we had just returned to his apartment after an especially long, difficult, rehearsal. After settling him in bed I told him, both Maude and Ninel were waiting to see him, ‘Who shall I send in first?’ ‘Ballet business first,’ he said, ‘send in Ninel.’

The opening gala was a sensation. From beside the stage he watched the ballet from his sofa. Afterwards, the tears flowed freely everywhere and he shakily took his 15 minutes of applause, supported by the ballerinas.

Previously we had discussed if he wanted to take his award on stage and attend the gala supper. The risks were that the spotlights would make his still-secret illness apparent. He said simply, ‘Show goes on.’ After the awards a sumptuous meal in the west wing of the Opera was under way when Rudolf took his place at the head table. After the first course Pierre Berge, Chairman of the Opera, found me to say Rudolf must leave immediately. Together, arm in arm, while the 600 guests rose, most weeping and clapping for their ailing star, we led him out.

After three days he had recovered a bit and was determined to fly to the sunshine for a last time. Against doctors’ order he returned to ‘St Barts’. He was back in Paris at the beginning of November; the illness had taken a frightful toll. But, although he was a shell of his former self, the ideas and plans still tumbled out of his prodigious mind. I finally saw him just after Christmas propped up on pillows in his hospital bed. He did not recognise me, but his favourite Bach was playing and one of his painfully thin arms was slowly moving in the air, as if he was rehearsing for some future concert.

Charles Korvin was born in 1907 in what is now Slovakia. He came to Hollywood in 1944 and made “Enter Arsene Lupin”. Other movies include “This Love Of Ours” with Merle Oberon and “Ship of Fools” in 1965 with Vivien Leigh and Simone Signoret. He died in 1998 in New York.

IMDB entry:

He was born in Piestany, Hungary, and came to the United States in 1940 after ten years studying at the Sorbonne where he worked in still and motion picture photography. After studying acting at the Barter Theater (Abingdon, VA), he made his 1943 debut on Broadway in “Dark Eyes” under the name Geza Korvin. It was then than movie producer Charles K. Feldman signed him to a contract with Universal. There, with the new name Charles Korvin, he played the title role, a French thief, in “Enter Arsene Lupin” (1944). His next three movies paired him romatically with Merle Oberon. After a contract dispute with Universal, and though blacklisted by HUAC in 1951, he played a number villain, thief and philanderer roles for different studios, including the part of the evil Russian agent Rokov in Lex Barker’s “Tarzan’s Savage Fury” (1952). He also appeared in many TV episodes, notably as The Eagle in the “Zorro” series (1957) and as the Latin dance instructor Carlos in “The Honeymooners”. He returned to Hollywood in Stanley Kramer’s “Ship of Fools” (1965). He had homes in Manhattan and Klosters, Switzerland, and died, aged 90, at the Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, survived by his wife, Natasha; a daughter, Katherine Pers of Budapest; a son, Edward Danziger Dorvin of Santa Monica, CA; and three grandchildren.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan <stephan@cc.wwu.edu>

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Juliette is a French chanson singer who in the late 1950’s starred in some 20th Century Fox international film productions. She was born in Montpellier in 1927. They include “The Sun Also Rises” in 1957 with Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Errol Flynn, “The Roots of Heaven” and “The Big Gamble” with Stephen Boyd. Ms Greco died in 2020.

IMDB entry:

Juliette Gréco was born on February 7, 1927 in Montpellier, Hérault, France. She is an actress, known for Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Le regard de Georges Brassens (2013) andBrel, Brassens, Ferré, trois hommes sur la photo (2008). She has been married to Gérard Jouannest since 1988. She was previously married to Michel Piccoli and Philippe Lemaire.

Agnes Poirer’s article in “The Guardian” in 2014

We’re at Gréco’s house on the Côte d’Azur, sitting by a huge open fire crackling away in the middle of a vast whitewashed room with African masks on the walls and two big sofas. I was hoping we’d chat beneath the lemon trees on her sun terrace, but today the Côte d’Azur is buried in mist and drizzle, which lent the lush landscape a strange melancholy as I ascended the winding roads to Gréco’s den in the hills above St Tropez.

The icon of French chanson shares this place with her third husband, Gérard Jouannest, the pianist and composer who co-wrote the music and lyrics for 35 of Jacques Brel’s greatest songs, including Ne Me Quitte Pas. Gréco still looks astonishingly youthful, even though she wears no makeup, apart from her signature kohl eyeliner. This may be because she has never taken life seriously. Despite her astonishing, deep voice, she is prone to giggling like a teenager. Next to her, one can’t help feeling ancient and slow, not least because she has just released a new album – at the age of 86.

In Gréco Chante Brel, she delivers 12 songs by the Belgian legend. One of the most striking is Amsterdam, which Gréco has turned into a kind of psychedelic oratorio, evoking the Dutch capital’s prostitutes and sailors drinking themselves into oblivion. It certainly captures Brel’s dark inner world. “I met Brel in 1954,” she says. “He was a gentle genius. His world, unlike mine, is violent and coarse, but the great thing about being a woman is I don’t have to imitate him. I can be myself.”

This, besides her singing, has always been Gréco’s great talent: being herself, a survivor, unique and untamed. Gréco was just 16 when the Gestapo arrested her and her older sister in Paris in 1943. Their mother, arésistante, had vanished shortly before. Gréco was released, alone, a few months later. Wearing just the blue cotton dress she’d had on when she was arrested, and with no home to return to, she stepped out of the notorious Fresnes prison into one of the coldest winters on record – and walked the eight miles back into town.

She turned to her mother’s friend Hélène Duc, an actor and fellowrésistante who lived in a shabby little hotel. Duc found her a room and some food, but Gréco had nothing to wear apart from that blue dress and raffia sandals. “I was so cold and so hungry,” she says, “that I stayed in bed for two years.” Male friends, aspiring actors and art students, gave her clothes. Except they were far too big, so she rolled them up: shirts, jumpers, jackets, trousers, the lot. In the streets and cafes, heads turned – and a new fashion was born. And a star, too. Gréco’s look and intense gaze would soon be immortalised by the giants of photography: Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau all shot Gréco.

Postwar life was harsh: food was scarce, housing shabby, but the feeling of freedom was a joy. “We were poor,” she says. “But it didn’t matter, for we were free at last, and we all shared the little we had.” Gréco, like all the artists and intellectuals of the time, lived on the left bank, renting a room with a bath tub. She never locked it, so other people could use it. “The room wasn’t great for sleeping: there were always a few friends who needed a shower in the middle of the night. I’d find some of them asleep in the corridor – they’d passed out before reaching the door.”

Gréco in 1961. Photograph: Erwin Lowe/RexWith her long black hair and fringe, her penetrating stare and her oversized clothes, Gréco became the left bank’s muse, its existentialist mascot, the gamine girl photographers never tired of. She was keen on acting, but when she started singing, things took off in that direction. “I wanted to be a tragedian, but a friend suggested I use my voice differently. I loved poetry and literature, so why not voice poems?” Voicing is a good way of describing Gréco’s singing style. “I am no Maria Callas, that’s for sure,” she laughs, “but I have had this truly astonishing career, touring the world, singing all those wonderful things in front of large crowds.”

She chose poems by the likes of Jacques Prévert and asked composers to set them to music. One was Joseph Kosma, who wrote soundtracks forJean Renoir. When she sang Parlez-Moi d’Amour, it was a sign that her days of earning a paltry five francs per show were over. This 1930s classic, now recorded in 37 languages, is one of those inimitable chansons about love and kissing that made French singers – fromCharles Trenet to Georges Brassens to Serge Gainsbourg – famous the world over. Gréco joined their ranks, and now Prévert was writing songs for her. And Jean-Paul Sartre, too.

Yes, Sartre penned songs for Gréco. Ah, those were the days. “Gréco has a million poems in her voice,” wrote the world’s most famous intellectual. “It is like a warm light that revives the embers burning inside of us all. It is thanks to her, and for her, that I have written songs. In her mouth, my words become precious stones.”

Men were drawn to her. Women, too. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological philosopher, fell in love with her; Simone de Beauvoir, acting as chaperone, introduced her to Truman Capote and William Faulkner (who looked the other way when, starving, she stuffed her bag with petits fours at a famous publisher’s cocktail party). Miles Davis, playing in Paris with Dizzy Gillespie, fell madly in love with her. “Sartre asked Miles why we didn’t get married, but Miles loved me too much, he said, to marry me. You’d be seen as a ‘negro’s whore’ in the US, he told me, and this would destroy your career. We saw each other regularly until his death. He was one of the most elegant men I have known.”

Davis was just one in a long list of suitors: Gréco has left dozens of heartbroken men in her wake. Two committed suicide, and a few others made failed attempts. The press tried to make her feel responsible. “I don’t care what they say,” she wrote in Jujube, her 1982 autobiography. “I don’t believe I can inspire such passion.” Other men who fell for her included the Hollywood tycoon Darryl F Zanuck, who gave her starring roles in John Huston’s Roots of Heaven and Richard Fleischer’s Crack in the Mirror.

“I played alongside Orson Welles in both,” she recalls. “I don’t think I have ever laughed as much in my life as during those years. The writerFrançoise Sagan was always visiting me then, too – she was barely 20 and really wicked, in the nicest way. We were like children. Orson was a genius and a gentle ogre, Françoise was extraordinarily witty. We loved eating, drinking and being merry. You should have seen us all after a dinner, roaring with laughter in St Tropez’s deserted streets at night. We were very naughty.”

The movie mogul David O Selznick once sent Gréco his private plane so she could join him for dinner in London. He offered her a seven-year contract in Hollywood. “I declined politely, trying not to laugh,” she says “It felt too inappropriate. Hollywood was definitely not for me.” There was also the great French actor Michel Piccoli, who won her over during a dinner by making her laugh for the whole evening. “A few weeks later, we were married. And then, after a while, we both stopped laughing.”

Our conversation returns to Paris in 1943. She lived off Viandox – a cheap meat broth much like Bovril, served hot in cafes – and earned scraps here and there, working in theatre and films as an extra, always trying to get more parts. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, she went every day to the Lutétia hotel, where survivors from concentration camps were arriving. One day, among a crowd of skeletal, liberated prisoners, she spotted her sister and mother. “What I endured in occupied Paris was nothing compared to their two years in Ravensbrück,” she says. “We held each other tight, in silence. There were no words for what I felt at that instant.”

Gréco is still in constant demand, and France’s fascination with her shows little sign of dwindling. Hedi Slimane, the fashion designer and creative director for Yves Saint Laurent, recently photographed Gréco and asked her to be YSL’s brand ambassador. And today, when she walks the streets of Paris, women of all ages stop her and tell her she’s been an inspiration to them. “Phew,” she says, roaring with laugher. “I have been useful after all.”

Some even ask if they can give her a kiss. What does she say? “Please do!”

• Gréco plays the Paris Olympia on 16 and 17 May.

• This article was amended on 19 February 2014. An earlier version spelled David O Selznick’s name as David O’Selznick.

The above “Guardian” article can aso be accessed online here.

Obituary in “The Telegraph” in 2020.

Juliette Gréco, the singer and actress, who has died aged 93, was known in Paris as “the muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés” and was reckoned not only an emblem of the ideas of Sartre, de Beauvoir and other Left Bank existentialist intellectuals, but also of 1950s France.

While still a teenage drama student, Juliette Gréco became a familiar figure on the Left Bank. Her daringly boyish uniform of black sweater and pedal-pushers teamed with her raven hair, dark eyes and ivory skin prompted Picasso to comment that “you moonbathe while others sunbathe”. Her personality, both fragile and fiercely independent, did not disappoint.

Having been introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre by the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco was embraced as the apotheosis of female liberation – as called for in de Beauvoir’s La Deuxième Sexe,.

In 1949 she was asked to make an appearance at the reopening of the Right Bank cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Sartre persuaded her to sing, arranged for the popular composer Joseph Kosma to accompany her, and picked three songs which would suit her. Although she described herself as “petrified”, she was “inoculated by the stage virus” and caused a sensation.

Sartre was the first of many influential French writers to provide lyrics for Juliette Gréco’s songs.

When asked why he and others such as Prévert, Mauriac and Camus should give their poetry to a mere chanteuse, he replied: “The writer often forgets the words have sensual beauty. Gréco’s voice reminds us. Gentle, warm and light, her voice rekindles their fire.” She referred to these songs as “my passport … my whole life”.

Juliette Gréco was born on February 7 1927 in Montpellier and began training as a dancer at the Opéra de Paris when she was nine. Her studies were cut short by the outbreak of war, and when she was 15 her mother and sister were sent to a prison camp for Resistance activities.

Juliette herself was imprisoned for a few weeks (for slapping a Gestapo officer, she claimed). On finding herself incarcerated with prostitutes, she characteristically made the most of things, using the time to learn about men.

On her release Juliette Gréco returned to Paris alone and began acting classes. Although she never claimed to be an intellectual or even an existentialist, her beauty and curiosity ensured her friendship with the philosophers, artists and writers who frequented the cafes and clubs of Saint-Germain.

After the enthusiastic response to her professional debut as a singer at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, Juliette Gréco soon moved to La Rose Rouge on the Rue de Rennes, and it was here that her reputation was made.

Wearing an austere black Balmain dress bought in a sale, she would replace the coy innuendo of the original lyrics with her own more explicit choices. One observer described her hanging on to the microphone stand “like a shipwrecked man clinging to a lifebelt”.

At La Rose Rouge she met Marlon Brando who, in his trademark white T-shirt, would take her home on the back of his motorcycle. Despite her later assertion that “rarely have I seen such a good-looking man”, he did not become her lover as he was pursuing the singer Eartha Kitt at the time.

Juliette Gréco’s first film was Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949) in which she made a memorable appearance as a leather-clad gang leader.

Her growing international reputation in the mid-1950s culminated in a short-lived Hollywood career, with well-received roles in such films as John Huston’s The Roots of Heaven (1958) and Richard Fleischer’s Crack in the Mirror (1960), both with Orson Welles.

But after ending an affair with the producer Darryl F Zanuck, she turned her back on Hollywood, preferring to concentrate on her singing

Of her numerous recordings, many – such as those written by Jacques Brel, Charles Trenet and Charles Aznavour – have become French standards.

Her collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg produced La Javanaise, which is now such a French institution that it is taught in schools. She carried on recording into her seventies, still keen to find young writers who would match up to those of her youth.

She also travelled widely, performing in more than a dozen countries a year, craving the “joy and terror” of being on stage. Her enduring popularity owed much to her ability to transport people back to a time when, as she put it, “we were free, and to be free is the most precious thing in life.”

Juliette Gréco had many love affairs, including one with the black American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

She was never intimidated by those who disapproved, once spitting into the hand of a New York maître d’ who practically refused to serve them. “In America,” she later wrote, “his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn’t even notice.”

Although in her later years Juliette Gréco lived just outside Paris, she would return frequently to the city, always staying at the Hôtel Lutétia, where she had been reunited with her mother and sister after the war. In her hotel bedroom, a stone’s throw from Saint-Germain, she would sleep with the curtains open so that she could see the Eiffel Tower.

In 1984 she was appointed to the Légion d’honneur in recognition of her status as an ambassadress of French song.

Despite her insistence that her three marriages were all undertaken merely to please her husbands, in her last marriage, in 1988, to Gérard Jouannest, a composer and pianist, Juliette Gréco appeared to have found an arrangement she desired. He died in 2018. Her previous marriages were to the actors Philippe Lemaire (1953), with whom she had a daughter, and Michel Piccoli (1966).

Juliette Gréco, born February 7 1927, died September 23 2020

Romy Schneider Guardian tribute

Romy Schneider Was an Austrian actress who scored a major success in the late 1950’s with her lead performances in the “Sissi” trilogy. Her mother was the actress Magda Schneider. She went on to make many films in Germany and France over the next few years. In 1963 she went to Hollywood to make the film “Good Neighbour Sam”. In 1973 she made the fim “Ludwig” for Luciano Viscounti. Over the next few years she matured into an exceptional actress. Tragically she died in 1982 shortly after the sad death of her 14 years old son in an accident.

A Filmblog article from “The Guardian” by Kate Connolly on Romy Schneider entitled “The Rehabilitation of Romy Schneider”:

The death of one of the German-speaking world’s best-known female actors could hardly have been more prosaic. Romy Schneider was found by her partner Laurent Petin, in their Paris apartment, sitting lifelessly at her desk. Slumped over the arm of her chair, an empty bottle of red wine in front of her, she had started to write a letter to a women’s magazine to cancel an interview. Her words broke off mid-sentence, the result of a heart attack, probably induced by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. It was May 1982 and Schneider was just 43.

It is a scene which will be re-enacted in two film versions of the actor’s life due out next year, one called Romy, starring Jessica Schwarz for SWR, an affiliate of German broadcaster ARD, the other, Warner Bros’ A Woman Like Romy, starring German soap star Yvonne Catterfeld.

Variety magazine has described the Austrian Schneider as “a magnet for film-makers”. But it was not ever so. Germany is celebrating what would have been her 70th birthday this week and the commemorations, marked by the usual coffee table books, DVD re-releases and film posters, stand in stark contrast to the way the German-speaking world used to perceive her. She was viewed as something of a traitor for turning her back on Germany.

Scampolo, poster, US poster art, Romy Schneider, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Unlike Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, who both shunned Nazi Germany and were never fully forgiven for doing so, the younger Schneider’s “crime”, like many German stars before and since, was simply that she chose to make her fortune in the tougher but more lucrative film studios of Paris and Hollywood, where of course the most beautiful lovers also resided, rather than in the Germany of the economic miracle era.

The height of Schneider’s fame came with the hugely popular Sissi trilogy of the 1950s in which she played the 19th-century Bavarian princess who went on to became Empress of Austria. She later starred as a more mature Sissi once again in Luchino Visconti’s 1972 film Ludwig about the life of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

She once complained: “Sissi sticks to me just like oatmeal.”

Indeed the Sissi roles somewhat overshadowed some of her other – arguably more memorable – film appearances, including Clive Donner’s What’s New Pussycat, Orson Welles’ The Trial and Jacques Deray’s The Swimming Pool, one of several films she made with her erstwhile lover Alain Delon.
Her early death certainly contributed to the mythical perception of her as the tortured woman of German film. After all her private tragedies certainly towered above the dramas in which she starred.

From the start her life was overshadowed by German history. She was born Rosemarie Albach in Vienna to her actor father, Wolf Albach-Retty, and her film-star mother, Magda Schneider. From their house they could see Hitler’s holiday domicile, Obersalzberg, where the Fuhrer received them, later declaring Magda to be his favourite actress. Romy would later claim her mother and Hitler had had an affair. It is perhaps no accident that she went on to play many Nazi-persecuted Jews.

She met Delon in 1959 and lived with him for five years, until one day he left her. His farewell note read: “Gone to Mexico with Natalie.” She slashed her wrists in response.

In 1966 she married the director Harry Meyen, a depressive due to the torture treatment he had received at the hands of the Gestapo as a “half-Jew”. He later hanged himself.

Her second marriage to her secretary Daniel Biasini ended in a divorce battle in 1981. She had an operation to remove a tumour on her kidneys, and then in the same year her 14-year-old son David punctured his femoral artery when climbing an iron-spiked fence at his step-grandparents’ home, and died.

“I’m just an unhappy 42-year-old woman and my name is Romy Schneider,” she said in one of her last interviews.

It has taken years since her death for Germans to fall in love with her. Two years ago she was voted Germany’s favourite actress by German broadcaster ZDF, and now, in time for her 70th, so many picture books and biographies have emerged that it seems her rehabilitation is almost complete. Next year the Filmmuseum on Potsdamer Platz will stage a glitzy Romy Schneider retrospective, complete with her costumes and jewellery.

It just goes to show that if you want to be loved, dying a young and tragic death helps no end. The Kate Connolly Film blog in “The Guardian” can also be accessed on-line here.

Antonio Sabato Jnr. is the son of actor Antonio Sabato and was born in Rome in 1972. His family moved to the U.S. when he was 13. He began his career on American television in the series “General Hospital” in 1992. His movies include “Jailbreakers”, “The Big Hit” and “Tribe”.

TCM overview:

An Italian-born model-turned-actor, Antonio Sabato, Jr. first dazzled audiences in 1990 with his sexy performance in the Janet Jackson video “Love Will Never Do (Without You).” Off-screen, he fathered a child with then-girlfriend Virginia Madsen, and onscreen proved so popular in the role of the brooding Jagger Cates on “General Hospital” (ABC, 1963- ) that he broke out of daytime to star as Alonzo Solace, a pilot on the sci-fi series “Earth 2” (NBC, 1994-95) and as Heather Locklear’s abusive first husband on “Melrose Place” (Fox, 1992-99). A frequent guest star on various series, Sabato worked steadily in made-for-TV movies and genre projects, including playing an ex-Navy SEAL in “Codename: Wolverine” (Fox, 1996) or starring in the schlocky “Shark Hunter” (2001). He essayed a strong supporting turn as a mysteriously vanished gay man in the indie “Testosterone” (2003), played a personal trainer on the sitcom “The Help” (The WB, 2004) and returned to soap operas, first as a sexy sculptor on “The Bold and the Beautiful” (CBS, 1987- ) before reprising Jagger on “General Hospital: Night Shift” (SOAPnet, 2007-08). He won the reality competition “Celebrity Circus” (NBC, 2008) before earning his own dating show, “My Antonio” (VH1, 2009), which saw women competing for Sabato’s hand as well as the approval of his formidable mother. Although he never achieved an acting role that equaled audiences’ reactions to his beauty, Antonio Sabato Jr. carved out a lengthy acting career with a good-natured, likable self-awareness that only added to his allure.

Born Feb. 29, 1972 in Rome, Italy, Antonio Sabato, Jr. moved to Beverly Hills, CA when he was 13. Blessed with a rugged beauty and a body to match, he went from being a Calvin Klein underwear model to appearing alongside fellow genetic lottery winner Djimon Hounsou in the iconic 1990 Janet Jackson music video “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” directed by Herb Ritts. So powerful and alluring was Sabato’s image onscreen that he springboarded yet again to acting, landing the role of the bad boy with a heart of gold, Jagger Cates, on the perennial soap opera “General Hospital” (ABC, 1963- ). His smoldering character and fabled onscreen relationship with Karen Wexler (Cari Shayne) led to him landing mainstream attention, including a spot on People magazine’s 1993 “50 Most Beautiful People” issue and three Soap Opera Digest Award nominations. His Hollywood stock rising, Sabato played a killer in “Moment of Truth: Why My Daughter?” (NBC, 1993) and graduated from daytime television to play the cocky, gifted pilot Alonzo Solace on the Emmy-nominated sci-fi series “Earth 2” (NBC, 1994-95).

He welcomed a baby with his then-girlfriend, actress Virginia Madsen, in 1994. The actor next notched a short-term role on the influential nighttime soap “Melrose Place” (Fox, 1992-99) as Jack Parezi, the abusive, hot-tempered first husband of Amanda Woodward (Heather Locklear). He went on to play Kellie Martin’s beau in the TV movie “Her Hidden Truth” (NBC, 1995) and then a murderer in the based-on-true-life “If Looks Could Kill: From the Files of ‘America’s Most Wanted'” (Fox, 1996) and toplined as an ex-Navy SEAL in the well-received thriller “Codename: Wolverine” (Fox, 1996). Made-for-TV movies provided Sabato with a plethora of roles, including “The Perfect Getaway” (ABC, 1998) and “Fatal Error” (TBS, 1999), but he also took a supporting role in the Mark Wahlberg/Christina Applegate crime caper “The Big hit” (1998) and continued to accrue TV guest spots, including roles on “Ally McBeal” (Fox, 1997-2002), “The Outer Limits” (Showtime, 1995-2000; Sci Fi, 2001-02) and “Charmed” (The WB, 1998-2006).

Although Sabato worked steadily and was widely recognized, he settled into a lower-tier stardom, appearing most frequently in genre or low-budget projects, including the schlocky creature features “Shark Hunter” (2001) and “Bugs” (USA Network, 2003), as well as the Anna Nicole Smith-inspired oddity “Wasabi Tuna” (2003) and the indie “Testosterone” (2003), which cast Sabato as a mysterious Argentinian whose disappearance inspires his boyfriend to travel to South America. The actor nabbed a series regular role as a personal trainer on the sitcom “The Help” (The WB, 2004) and went on to book a guest spot on the ill-fated “Friends” (NBC, 1994-2004) spin-off “Joey” (NBC, 2004-06) and star in the cheesy terrorism thriller “Crash Landing” (2005). That same year, he returned to soap operas as the sexy Italian sculptor Dante Damiano on “The Bold and the Beautiful” (CBS, 1987- ). Although he earned two Image Award nominations for his work, Sabato was let go from the soap after a year.

His streak of made-for-TV genre films continued, including “Deadly Skies” (Here!, 2007), “Reckless Behavior: Caught on Tape” (Lifetime, 2007), “Destination: Infestation” (Lifetime Movie Network, 2007) and “Ghost Voyage” (Sci Fi Channel, 2008). Sabato also reprised his star-making role of Jagger Cates on “General Hospital: Night Shift” (SOAPnet, 2007-08) before booking guest spots on “NCIS” (CBS, 2003- ), “CSI: NY” (CBS, 2004- ), “Rizzoli & Isles” (TNT, 2010- ), “Bones” (Fox, 2005- ) and “Hot in Cleveland” (TV Land, 2010- ). Although Sabato had appeared on reality TV before, competing on the celebrity-focused “But Can They Sing?” (VH1, 2005) and winning “Celebrity Circus” (NBC, 2008), he starred on his own dating reality show, “My Antonio” (VH1, 2009), in which his mother helped him choose from a bevvy of beauties, including his ex-wife. Apparently the winner did not capture Sabato’s real-life heart, however, since in 2011 he fathered a child with Cheryl Moana Marie Nunes with the impressive name of Antonio Kamakanaalohamaikalani Harvey Sabato III.

By Jonathan Riggs

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

The beautiful Ms Sparv was a popular leading in movies of the 1960’s. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1943. She played opposite James Coburn in “Dead Heat on a Merry |Go-Round” in 1966. She starred opposite Hayley Mills in “The Trouble With Angels” and Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer”. She is now retired from acting.

TCM Overview:

Camilla Sparv was an accomplished actress who led an impressive career, primarily on the big screen. Early on in her acting career, Sparv landed roles in various films, including “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round” (1966), “Murderers’ Row” (1966) with Dean Martin and the comedy adaptation “The Trouble With Angels” (1966) with Rosalind Russell. She also appeared in “Assignment K” (1968) and the Robert Redford dramatic adaptation “Downhill Racer” (1969). She continued to act in productions like “MacKenna’s Gold” (1969) with Gregory Peck, the dramatic biopic “The Greek Tycoon” (1978) with Anthony Quinn and “Winter Kills” (1979). Her work around this time also included a part on the TV movie “Never Con a Killer” (ABC, 1976-77). Toward the end of her career, she tackled roles in “Caboblanco” (1981) and the Chuck Wagner action picture “America 3000” (1986). She also had a part in the TV miniseries “Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls 1981″” (1981-82). Sparv more recently appeared in “The Naked Truth” (Cinemax, 1992-93). Sparv was married to Robert Evans.

The above TCM Overview can also be accessed online here.

The House On 92nd Street, poster, from left: William Eythe, Signe Hasso, Lloyd Nolan, Leo G. Carroll, 1945. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Signe Hasso was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1915. She came to Hollywood in 1940 when she won an RKO contract. Her movies include “Heaven Can Wait”, “A Double Life” and “The House on 92nd Street|”. She died in Los Angeles in 2002.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

Although in no way competing with her compatriots Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish actor Signe Hasso, who has died aged 91, had her fair share of Hollywood fame in the 1940s.

The decade was a good one for European actors in America because of the plethora of second world war dramas and films noirs , in which anyone with a foreign accent could play French, Dutch, German, Russian or Polish characters – on the assumption that audiences would be none the wiser. Hasso, for example, became French in at least four films, including Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943), in which she was a saucy French maid.

She was also chosen for George Cukor’s A Double Life (1948), where she had to play Desdemona in scenes from Othello, although her slight Swedish intonation was briefly referred to. In this, her most demanding role, she was touching as the stage partner and former wife of actor Ronald Colman, who nearly strangles her. But despite her good reviews and the film’s two Oscars (for Colman and composer Miklos Rozsa), Hasso’s screen career gathered little impetus, and she returned to the theatre.

She was born Signe Larsson in Stockholm and, at the age of 12, appeared in productions at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. At 16, she became the youngest person to enrol in the theatre’s academy. Her first success was in the title role of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, and she continued to act under her own name until her marriage to Swedish producer Harry Hasso in 1933, the year she entered films.

In 1940, she decided to go to the United States with her young son because she had been offered a contract by RKO, her marriage had broken down and the Nazis had invaded Norway. But RKO failed to come up with any roles, and, after a short runon the New York stage, she made her Hollywood debut for MGM with a brief part in Journey For Margaret (1942) – just as her friend Garbo departed both the studio and films for ever.

In Assignment In Brittany (1943), Hasso co-starred with Jean-Paul Aumont in a story set in Nazi- occupied France. In Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross (1944), she supplied the love interest as a Dutch waitress helping concentration camp escapee Spencer Tracy regain his faith in humanity. In the same year, Cecil B DeMille cast her as a Dutch nurse loved by missionary medic Gary Cooper, in The Story Of Doctor Wassell.

Hasso then went back to being a French refugee, in Johnny Angel (1945). More effective, from her point of view, was her performance as a Nazi spy-ring leader disguised as a glamorous New York dress-shop owner, in Henry Hathaway’s The House On 92nd Street (1945).

Hasso then appeared in Douglas Sirk’s classy A Scandal In Paris (1946), and in a Ninotchka-type role in Where There’s Life (1947). Her last major Hollywood part was as Isabel Farrago, the cool wife of José Ferrer’s South American dictator, in Crisis (1950). On stage in the 1950s, she app- eared in Uncle Vanya and The Apple Cart, as well as in live television dramas. After her son died in a car accident in 1957, she returned to Sweden for a while, though she was soon acting again both in Sweden and the US, mostly on stage and in television.

Hasso, who held dual citizenship, also wrote music and lyrics for the album Scandin-avian Folk Songs Sung And Swung, and published novels, short stories and articles. In 1972, Sweden made her a knight first-class in the Royal Order of Vasa, and, in 1994, she was granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Last year, Hasso was seen paying fulsome tribute to her compatriot in the television documentary, Greta Garbo: A Lone Star. But unlike Garbo, although a widow from her second marriage, Hasso lived out her life in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends and admirers.

· Signe Hasso (Signe Larsson), actor, born August 15 1910; died June 8 2002

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.