Harriet Andersson was born in 1932 in Stockholm. She is associated with the films of the great Ingmar Bergman. Her films with him include “Smiles of a Summer Night” in 1955, “Through a Glass Darkly”, “Cries and Whispers” and in 1972, “Fanny and Alexander”. Her other films include “A Deadly Afffair” directed by Sidney Lumet in 1966 and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” in 2003.
TCM Overview:
A sensual, stunningly beautiful member of Ingmar Bergman’s troupe, Harriet Andersson was featured in many of the director’s early classics. Unlike other typical Swedish leading ladies, Andersson was dark-haired, but her outsider appearance was used to smoldering, even kittenish appeal. She began by performing dance halls while still a teenager and at age 18 made her screen debut in “Medan Staden Sover/While the City Sleeps” (1950). Bergman cast her two years later using her coarse but sensual appeal to good effect in “Summer with Monika” (It is a still photograph from this film that Jean-Pierre Leaud steals in Francois Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece “The 400 Blows”.) For the director, she was often the lower-class girl, as in her circus performer in “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) or her maid Petra in the comic “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955). Bergman elevated her somewhat as the schizophrenic in “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961) and the dying sister in “Cries and Whispers” (1972) but in their final screen collaboration “Fanny and Alexander” (1981) had her back as a kitchen maid.
Despite the international attention Andersson received for her work with Bergman, it was her husband Jorn Donner who offered her more substantial roles. She received a Best Actress citation from the 1964 Venice Film Festival as a married woman rediscovering the pleasures of sex and romance in Donner’s “To Love”. More recently, Andersson projected underlying rebellion as a sympathetic teacher in “Beyond the Sky” (1993).
Unlike her colleagues such as Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann who were also launched by Bergman, Andersson has made few international films. She made her English-language debut in Sidney Lumet’s “The Deadly Affair” (1966), but seemed more at ease working with her countrymen. Andersson has made a handful of Swedish TV-movies, including “I HHHavsbandet” (1971), and occasional stage appearances, including playing Anne Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 1953 and Ophelia in “Hamlet”.
Lila Kedrova was born in Russia in 1918. She joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1932. She made many French films in the 1950’s and in 1964 she replaced Simone Signoret in “Zorba the Greek” with Anthony Quinn. She won an Academy Award for her performance. She went on to make “Torn Curtain” with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won critial acclaim in 1980 for her performance with Melvyn Douglas in “Tell Me A Riddle”. She died in Ontario, Canada in 2000 at the age of 81.
Her “Guardian” obituary:
Lila Kedrova was rumoured to be 80 when she died – she had chosen her own birth date when all paper evidence was abandoned as her family fled Russia after the Revolution: she liked to say that this allowed her to be any age she wanted. And her preferred age was 16, the age of the soubrette.
That was her gift: she played tragic soubrettes, foolish but not silly young women aged 38 and 66 and 71, still willing to believe that romance will blossom even as they recount, broken-voiced, how romance has failed them in the past.
Kedrova was 45 when director Michael Cacoyannis phoned from Crete to invite her to take over the role of Mme Hortense in Zorba the Greek, after Simone Signoret walked out on him a week into shooting. His Hollywood producers advised him to buy the biggest replacement name around, but he knew that Kedrova – whom he called Little Monster for her persistence – had yearned for the role, even though she was 20 years too young to be the consumptive whore.
He asked in French if she could speak English. “Oui,” she lied, flew forthwith from Paris to Crete, caught flu, hid in bed and learned her lines for the first scene. The whole crew, protective of her, coached her: in snagged crochet gloves, she gave the truest performance in that phoney film: her Hortense abandoned herself as totally as an adolescent to hope. Sentiment made her brave. She won an Oscar.
In 1984, by which time she was the right age and rather more – “smeary-faced, shimmery, out of a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas” wrote Frank Rich – she won a Tony for Hortense again, once more opposite Anthony Quinn, in the Broadway musical version.
Lila, short for Elizabeth, was born in whatever was the Russian equivalent of a theatre trunk. Her father was a singer, director of the Kedroff Quartet, her mother in the Petrograd Opera. Lila Kedrova studied piano (encouraged by Shostakovich, for whom she claimed she turned pages of score), her education broken by the family flight first to Germany, then Paris – at the beginning of the Stalin terror, a stranger on the street told her father he was on the list to be purged.
The Kedroffs were Bohemian refugees; Lila went barefoot; Lila was acquainted with Stravinsky and Prokofiev; Lila ran off with the gypsies and pretended to be an orphan to join the circus, pulling a “big, old, friendly” bear around the ring on a chain.
At 14, she joined the emigré Moscow Arts Theatre, a Stanislavsky-style touring company; learnt discipline singing in cafe-concert, (“Quick-quick, I change dress, make up, all”); and studied at drama school under actor-director Pierre Valide, whom she married.
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Penelope, poster, US poster art, from left: Lila Kedrova, Lou Jacobi, Peter Falk, Dick Shawn (standing on head), Natalie Wood (front), Ian Bannen Jonathan Winters, 1966. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
In the 50s, he directed her initial stage successes, including The Rose Tattoo. She was in A View from The Bridge, A Taste of Honey, and a drug addict in Razzia sur la Chnouf, for which she won the French critics’ best performance award in 1955, when it was made into a film.
She reluctantly took roles in European and Hollywood films – including Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and A High Wind in Jamaica – but hated to leave the stage even for a holiday. After Zorba, she could have patented the character on the movie cameo role circuit of the time, but she did not: her best performance was in Polanski’s 1976 The Tenant.
Onstage, she took the part she had always been meant to play, Lyuba Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in London in 1967: her Ranevskaya’s sense of loss at parting with the estate was overcome by excitement at rejoining her lover and frittering away the money in Paris. (During the production she had met her second husband, Canadian stage director Richard Howard.)
The next year, she was Frau Schroeder, Sally Bowles’s Berlin landlady in the London production of Cabaret, a widow romanced by a Jewish greengrocer: this time love did not make her brave. “What would you do?”, she half-growled, half whispered, and – parting pragmatically with hope – “It’ll all go on, if we’re here or not. So who cares. So what?” But when she played Gigi’s aunt at the Fortune in 1976, she seemed, for all the wisdom, younger than teenage Gigi; she was perfectly wistful as Madame Armfeld in A Little Night Music at Chichester in 1989.
Kedrova remained with Howard, based in Canada and Paris, until her death. She leaves no other family.
• Lila (Elizabeth) Kedrova, actress, born October 9 1919; died February 16 2000
Anna Sten was hailed as a successor to Greta Garbo. It did not happen but she was a good actress and her Hollywood films are worth checking out. She was born in the Ukraine in 1908. She made some German silent films and made a smoth transition to sound with 1931’s “Trapeze” and “The Brothers Karamazov” which were seen by the U.S. producer Samuel Goldwyn. He brought Ms Sten to Hollywood where she made 1934 “We Live Again” with Fredric March and “The Wedding Night” opposite Gary Cooper.When the movies did not prove successful at the box office, Goldwyn cancelled her contract. She continued to make films throught the 1940’s but often in supporting roles. Her husband was a very successful American producer Eugene Frenke. Anna Sten died in New York in 1993 at the age of 84.
Her “Independent” obituary:
GARBO] DIETRICH] STEN] It doesn’t have the same ring to it, but if their pre-Hollywood work is considered, Anna Sten leaves the others at the starting gate (Garbo with admittedly only two films). In Hollywood it was a different matter. Imported on the strength of the success of the other two, Sten was reasonably expected to outshine both: but she became the outstanding, the most publicised of all those who didn’t make it. ‘Goldwyn’s folly’ she was called, after he had spent over dollars 5m on failing to make her a star.
She became famous in her native Soviet Union in the lead of Boris Barnet’s near-perfect comedy The Girl with the Hatbox (1927), as a naive country girl being either misunderstood or wooed by some of Moscow’s most colourful young men. One of these was the great screen villain Vladimir Fogel, and she ran foul of him again in the grim The Yellow Ticket (1928), directed by Fedor Ozep, whom she married. Again she was the girl from the steppes, Fogel the wealthy bourgeois Muscovite whose children she was looking after, and her refusal to play footsy finds her eventually working the streets.
Of her half-dozen Russian films, this became the most renowned throughout Europe, and Ozep took her to Germany to play Grushenka in his version of Dostoevsky, Der Morder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931). It may still be the best screen transcription of that writer, with Fritz Kortner on magnificent form as Dimitri, and Sten as the trollop who causes his downfall. This was one of the screen’s cliche roles, but Sten, part Marilyn Monroe, part Nancy Carroll, seemed never to have seen any previous screen vamp – let alone studied them.
Word from Europe was that Sten could out-Garbo Garbo, so Goldwyn was mindful to have her under contract. It was not perhaps a mistake on his part to publicise Sten as the new Garbo, since such was the fate of most of the other (female) European imports – though few of these remained residents of LA for long. It was an error to announce that her grooming would be in the hands of Dietrich’s mentor Josef von Sternberg, when neither he nor the equally autocratic Goldwyn ever took kindly to any ideas but his own. It was also foolish to spend two whole years with a constant barrage of publicity emerging about ‘tests’, plus the amounts being spent to turn Sten into a Hollywood ‘personality’, and on the search to find the vehicle to launch her.
It went without saying that puritan America was titillated by this formula: Old Europe plus beauty equals sin and temptation, and it was Zola’s whore, Nana, who became Sten’s first transatlantic incarnation – though not without a record number of tribulations. The first version, directed by George Fitzmaurice, was scrapped, and it was entirely remade by Dorothy Arzner. Goldwyn booked Radio City Music Hall for two almost unprecedented weeks (King Kong was another matter) – this was 1934 – and the suspense engendered among moviegoers, which meant just about everybody, was ended: it wasn’t that Sten wasn’t any good, but that she wasn’t very good. Acting in English, she was just another arch and accented seductress; and Zola’s great original had become merely another pot-bouille of the sins available to those who frequented the boulevards.
Goldwyn quickly rallied, returning Sten to Russia for a version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, now entitled We Live Again (1934), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Fredric March played the Prince who lives an idyll with his peasant sweetheart and has his way with her, later, after learning the ways of the Imperial court. He repents after she has lost the baby and slipped far, far along the primrose path. This adaptation made Tolstoy irredeemably coy and was avoided by cinemagoers who had already had two chances to see Hollywood versions of this tale during the previous seven years.
Goldwyn tried again, and again with a notable director, King Vidor, The Wedding Night (1935). Sten became a Polish Connecticut peasant girl who attracts the discontented city writer Gary Cooper
Three Russian Girls, poster, from top, left, Anna Sten, Mimi Forsythe, Kathy Frye; right inset, Kent Smith, Anna Sten, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
When The Wedding Night became one of the few Cooper films to lose money Goldwyn was forced, finally, to see the writing on the wall. In letting Sten go he was relieved, at least, of the constant battles with her and her second husband, Eugene Frenke, over the publicity. Frenke took her to Britain for A Woman Alone (1936), which Ozep directed. Little was heard of it and less of Sten, till Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Russia’s war effort brought a few offers in films extolling the same. A handful of other movies followed, and in the Fifties she attempted to revive her career by studying at the Actors’ Studio. This led to the tour of Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, as Jenny, following its first presentation in New York, when Louis Armstrong’s record of ‘Mac the Knife’ did no harm at all. Sten found greater success with a new career – as a painter, exhibiting several times in New York.
She was one of cinema’s great enigmas. Most of the movies and people whom Goldwyn believed in are among the most disposable artefacts of Hollywood’s past. The exceptions – Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Wyler – worked with him under duress, for high salaries or/and brooking no interference. To read about Sten and Goldwyn or see the films she made for him is to be reminded of the inanities of an era long gone: but those of her dozen European films that I have seen might have been made yesterday.
The avove “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anna Gaylor was born in 1932 in Paris. She made her film debut in 1956 in “Mannequins of Psris”. She did make some British films, “Seven Thunders” with Stephen Boyd and Tony Wright in 1957 and “Nor the Moon By Night” with Michael Craig and Belinda Lee. The rest of her career seems to have been based in France where she continues to act on film and television.
“Lynx-eyed, vivacious Ursula Andress was the nearest thing to a cartoonist’s version of a 1960’s sex symbol. In the 1960’s she complied with her image to a series of roles that bore little resemblance to reality”. – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors”. (2003)
Who will ever forget the first glimpse of Ursula Andress on film in “Dr No” in 1962? She played Honey Ryder to Sean Connery’s debut as James Bond. She was born in Switzerland in 1936. Prior to this, she hade made a few Italian movies and been to Hollywood wehere she was featured on television in Boris Karloff’s “Thriller” series. After “Dr No” she was back in Hollywood again making “Fun In Acapulco” with Elvis Presley and “4 For Texas” with Frank Sinatra, Dean Marin and Anita Ekberg. In “What’s New Pussycat” she starred with three other beaitiful actresses, Paula Prentiss, Romy Schneider and Capucine. She was excellent in the First World War aerial drama “The Blue Max” as the wife of James Mason having an affair with George Peppard. She continues to act on screen.
TCM Overview:
With her first major film role, actress Ursula Andress assured her place in pop culture history after audiences had their first glimpse of the athletic blonde beauty rising from the Caribbean surf, clad only in a glistening white bikini. After that breakout appearance in “Dr. No” (1962), the first film in the James Bond franchise, the young starlet was quickly placed in lightweight romps like “4 for Texas” (1962) and “Fun in Acapulco” (1962), opposite Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, respectively. Then-husband John Derek quickly used her to launch his directorial career with B-movie attempts like “Once Before I Die” (1965), although it was her 1965 Playboy pictorial that gained Andress far more attention at the time. Films like the Hammer Studios adventure “She” (1965), the Italian science fiction thriller “The Tenth Victim” (1966) and the WWI aerial melodrama “The Blue Max” (1966), all cashed in on Andress’ reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful women. With her marriage to the controlling Derek long over, the actress appeared in increasingly exploitative features like “Mountain of the Cannibal God” (1978) before meeting the much younger actor Harry Hamlin on the set of “Clash of the Titans” (1981), with whom she had her only child. In the years that followed, she appeared less and less on screen, but occasionally popped up in projects like the miniseries “Peter the Great” (1986) and the art house film “Cremaster 5” (1997), offering fans one more glimpse of the iconic sex symbol.
Born in Berne, Switzerland on March 19, 1936, she was one of six children born to a German diplomat father and a Swiss-German mother. Andress had a restless nature as a child, leaving Switzerland at 17 with a much older Italian actor. Once in Rome, she found work as a bit player in Italian films, mostly comedies which cast her for her abundant physical attributes rather than for any particular acting talent. Andress’ reputation for squiring famous international actors began during the late 1950s; one of her paramours, Marlon Brando, suggested that she try her hand in Hollywood and even arranged for some meetings with studio heads. After signing with Columbia, she headed to America, but found more success in landing boyfriends than movie roles. Among her male admirers during this period was James Dean, who allegedly asked her to accompany him on the ill-fated drive to San Francisco that claimed his life.
Andress found a more persistent suitor in John Derek, a fading matinee idol who was developing a reputation for maintaining strict control of his celebrity girlfriends’ careers and lives. Derek bought out her Columbia contract and kept her off the screen for the next six years. According to Andress, not surprisingly, the marriage was far from a happy one. But by 1962, she had returned to acting, landing the role that would make her an international sex symbol and pop icon – that of Honey Ryder, the first official “Bond Girl” in Terence Young’s film version of Ian Fleming’s “Dr. No.” Unlike many subsequent Bond Girls, Honey was fiercely independent and quite capable of taking care of herself. In one scene, she detailed how she took revenge on a man who raped her by placing a black widow spider in his mosquito netting. And if she became putty in Bond’s hands by the end of the film, men and women alike were captivated by Andress’ combination of lush sexuality, athleticism, and cool Germanic reserve, all of which helped to earn her a 1964 Golden Globe Award for “Dr. No.” Studios also took note of audiences’ reaction to Andress, and her film career was well under way. Amusingly, she also became a literary figure of sorts during this period when Bond author Ian Fleming mentioned her in a scene in his 1963 novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Despite her heavy accent – her dialogue was dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl in “Dr. No” – she found regular work in Hollywood films during the early 1960s. Sadly, the roles were only a few degrees more substantial than those she had landed during her early years in Rome, though she did manage to appear with some of the biggest names in entertainment during the period. She was partnered with another European sex symbol, Anita Ekberg, for the ludicrous Western comedy “4 For Texas” (1963) as love interests to unlikely cowpokes Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and was romanced by Elvis Presley in the lightweight musical romance “Fun in Acapulco” (1963). She then co-starred with Derek in two of his vanity projects as director: a World War II drama called “Once Before I Die” (1965) and a film noir called “Nightmare in the Sun” (1965) which was more notable for a supporting cast that included Sammy Davis, Jr., Robert Duvall, Aldo Ray, Keenan Wynn and John Marley than the plot, which had good guy Derek mixed up in a blackmail scheme centered around Andress’ married vixen. Not surprisingly, given the limitations placed on beautiful women in Hollywood, Andress garnered more attention for a 1965 layout in Playboy than for any of these features.
By the mid-1960s she was working more in European productions than in Hollywood, and settled into a string of largely ornamental roles that matched the opulence of their sets and locations. For England’s Hammer Films, she played the immortal ruler of a lost civilization in “She” (1965), and in the Woody Allen comedy, “What’s New, Pussycat?” (1965), she was one of several gorgeous starlets who fall madly in love with inveterate cad, Peter O’Toole. In the Italian science fiction thriller “The Tenth Victim” (1966), Andress was a hired killer who dispatched her victims with a brassiere that fired bullets, while in “The Blue Max” (1966), she was the sexually insatiable wife of a top general in Kaiser Wilhelm’s air force during World War I.
Andress’ marriage to Derek was unraveling during this period, and she eventually divorced him after launching into a passionate affair with French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, her co-star in “Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine” (“Chinese Adventures in China”) (1966), a lighthearted period comedy. The relationship was a tumultuous one, with both sides wreaking emotional and occasional physical havoc on each other or themselves. Despite the turmoil, she remained very active in European films, most notably the troubled and overblown Bond parody “Casino Royale” (1967). Other notable projects during this period were the caper drama “Perfect Friday” (1970) and “Red Sun” (1971), a curious mix of spaghetti Western and samurai film that pitted gunfighter Charles Bronson against Toshiro Mifune.
However, by the mid-1970s, Andress was mired in a string of low-budget and often low-rent projects that required little more from her than onscreen nudity. The most appalling of these were “The Sensuous Nurse” (1975), a rank Italian sexploitation comedy with Andress as the title character who has been hired by greedy relatives of a dying man to help facilitate his demise, and “Mountain of the Cannibal God” (1978), an Italian horror-adventure film that balances scenes of a nude Andress being painted all over by primitive tribesmen with footage of real animal slaughter. To perhaps balance the lack of quality in her projects, Andress was romantically involved with numerous leading men during the freewheeling 1970s, including Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal and Italian actor Fabio Testi. However, Andress frequently cited Derek as the one man to whom she felt the most connection.
In 1981, Andress was shrewdly cast as Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, in Ray Harryhausen’s special effects spectacular “Clash of the Titans.” She soon fell for the film’s leading man, then newcomer Harry Hamlin who was nearly 20 years her junior. She gave birth to their son, Dmitri, in 1980, but her relationship with Hamlin came to an end just two years later. Andress kept busy during the Eighties in international productions, as well as American television, where older but still glamorous actresses were in vogue on primetime soap operas. She did a one-year stint on “Falcon Crest” (CBS, 1981-1990) as an exotic foreigner who assists David Selby in retrieving Dana Sparks from a white slave ring, and later turned up in the miniseries “Peter the Great” (1986) opposite Maximillian Schell. One of her last film roles to date was a turn as a fantasy queen in the experimental film “Cremaster 5” (2005) by arthouse darling Matthew Barney. As Andress approached her seventh decade, her screen image retained its sensual power, and she was showered with praise and awards by several international publications. Britain’s Empire magazine named her one of the “100 Sexiest Stars in Film History” in 1995, while Channel 4 placed her arrival on the beach in “Dr. No” at the top of their “100 Greatest Sexy Moments” poll in 2003.
Franco Nero was born in 1941 in Parma, Italy. His first lead role was in the spaghetti Western “Django” in 1966. In 1967 he was brought to Hollywood to make the musical “Camelot” where he played Sir Lancelot. He met Vanessa Regdrave on this film and they have a son together. His other international films include “Force 10 from Naverone”, “The Virgin and the Gypsy” and “Die Hard 2”.
TCM Overview:
A handsome Italian leading man, Franco Nero first came to the attention of US audiences as Abel in John Huston’s epic “The Bible…In the Beginning” (1966). The following year, he cut a dashing figure as the youthful Lancelot opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s Guenevere in Joshua Logan’s opulent filming of the hit musical “Camelot”. Since then, Nero has appeared in over 50 motion pictures ranging from “A Quiet Place in the Country” (1968) to “Force Ten From Navaronne” (1978) to “Querelle” (1982) to “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” (1990). More recently, he played an idealistic doctor whose family is touched by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in “Talk of Angels” and was cast as the slain fashion designer in “The Versace Murders” (both 1998).On the small screen, Nero starred as the legendary silent screen actor in “The Legend of Valentino” (ABC, 1975) and later was featured in the miniseries “The Last Days of Pompeii” (ABC, 1984) and “Young Catherine” (TNT, 1991). With actress Vanessa Redgrave, he has a son Carlo Sparanero who is a director.
Rossano Brazzi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1916. He was raised in the city of Florence. He began his career in Italian films in 1938 with “Il destino in tasca”. In 1949 he went to Hollywood to make “Little Women” with June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien and Elizabeth Taylor. He returned to Italy shortly thereafterand resumed his career in Europe. In 1954 he starred in “Three Coins in the Fountain” and thus began twelve years of high profile films including “South Pacific” with Mitzi Gaynor perhaps his most wekk known role. He starred opposite some of the great ladies of the silver screen including Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Deborah Kerr, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Fontaine and Suzanne Pleshette. He died in 1994 at the age of 78.
Dark Purpose, poster, (aka L’INTRIGO), US poster, from top: Shirley Jones, Rossano Brazzi, George Sanders, Micheline Presle, Giorgia Moll, 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Rossano Brazzi’s obituary from “The Independent” newspaper by David Shipman:
As Hollywood’s enormous audience decamped to television in the 1950s the American film industry looked to Europe to help it out. The movie stars of Germany, France and Italy were imported in the hope that their American films would attract large audiences in their native countries. Sophia Loren made it big in the United States after a shaky start. Vittorio Gassmann, arguably the most versatile of the Italians, found it hard to find his niche in America. So for several years Rossano Brazzi was Hollywood’s favourite Italian male, a romantic figure, impeccably groomed and doubtless planning seduction over a candle-lit dinner for two in a Roman trattoria.
This was a role Brazzi played several times – if more successfully in the US than in Italy. After a short stage career Brazzi entered films in 1939, but his only Italian movie of this period to have entered the international repertory is La Tosca (1940),started by Jean Renoir but finished by Carl Koch after the French embassy had advised Renoir to leave the country as more and more Germans poured into Rome.
Given the subject – Rome at the time of Napoleonic invasion – the analogy could not have been lost on Renoir, or on Renoir’s compatriot Michel Simon, who stayed to complete his role as Scarpia. Imperio Argento, a popular actress of her day, was miscast as Tosca, but Brazzi fared better as her Cavaradossi.
La Tosca was not seen in the US until 1947, the third of Brazzi’s pictures to appear there almost simultaneously, attracting the attention of Mervyn Le Roy at MGM, who chose Brazzi to play the professor to June Allyson’s Jo in the second sound version ofLittle Women (1949). He was both strong and sympathetic in the part, qualities little in demand in most of his other English-language movies.
He did not, in fact, return to Italy until 20th Century-Fox filmed John H. Secondari’s novel about three American girls involved in amorous adventures while working in Rome, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), directed by Jean Negulesco. One of the women was played by Jean Peters, who gets Brazzi sacked because the staff aren’t supposed to fraternise with the locals: but because he isn’t exactly pleased when she thinks she’s pregnant by him the role hardly showed him in a pleasant light.
Nor did that in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Joseph Mankiewicz’s analysis of a movie star – Ava Gardner, playing someone very much like herself. Brazzi was the Italian aristocrat who confesses after marriage to her that he’s impotent. Mankiewicz thoughtthe film weakened because he himself did not have the courage to carry out his original intention of making the count homosexual.
The two films typecast Brazzi as a Latin lover likely to be not all what he seems. In David Lean’s Summer Madness (1955) he is the Venetian antiquarian attracting a middle-aged spinster secretary from the mid-West, played by Katharine Hepburn. He may be her first and last fling; she bites her lip on realising that she is only the latest in a long line of adulteries.
In Interlude (1957), he is again married, again seducing an American working in Europe, June Allyson; in The Story of Esther Costello he is a seedy but suave con man who tries to rape the orphan charge of his wife, Joan Crawford. In his third film that year, Legion of the Lost, he journeys into the Sahara with his true love, Sophia Loren, but deserts her when she refuses to let him have his way with her, later trying to kill John Wayne as he digs for water.
This was hardly a CV likely to qualify him for one of the most important movie roles available in 1958. On Broadway, South Pacific had been a triumph for Rodgers and Hammerstein and for Joshua Logan, who directed and who had written the book with Hammerstein.
Brazzi was cast for the film version as the ageing French Polynesian planter who captures the heart of an American nurse, though his singing voice was dubbed Giorgio Tozzi; but even among all the niceness Brazzi’s character remained somewhat dubious, having fathered two children by local women.
The film’s huge success was of no benefit to Brazzi. He continued to work, but chiefly in supporting roles. There were two notable exceptions: Negulesco’s Count Your Blessings (1959), in which he was a French playboy incapable of fidelity to Deborah Kerr, and The Battle of the Via Favorita (1965) as the widower whose re-marriage – to Maureen O’Hara – shocks their children
. He also directed himself in the Italo-American The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t (1965) and, under the pseudonym Edward Ross, SalvareLa Faccia (1969), a.k.a. Psychout for Murder. He also appeared in US teleseries such as Hawaii Five-O, Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart.
David Shipman
The “Independent” newspaper obituary can also be accessed here
Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia of Italian parents in 1938. In 1957 she won a beauty contest which brought her to the Venice Film Festival. Her firt film was the same year in “Goha”. She worked with Luchino Visconti in “Rocco and his Brothers” and “The Leopard”. She starred with Peter Sellers, Capucine and David Niven in “The Pink Panther” in 1963 and with John Wayne and Rita Hayworth in “Circus World”. In 1965 she was in Hollywood making “Blindfold” with Rock Hudson and “The Professionals” with Burt Lancaster. In Spain in 1968 she made the classic epic Western “Once Upon A Time in the West” with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. She lives in Paris.
Claudia Cardinale
“Claudia Cardinale , with her alluring eyes and husky voice, was one of the more desirable European imports of the 1960s and her hesitation with the English language only made made her that much more appealing” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors”. (2003).
TCM overview:
Though the international film market was glutted with sultry European actresses during the 1960s, few could boast the depth and range of talent as Claudia Cardinale. Blessed with an extraordinary face and figure, Cardinale began her career as lovely window dressing in films like “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958). But she soon proved to the cinematic community that her screen abilities were far greater than her photogenic nature, as evidenced by nuanced turns in “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961), Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963) and Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard.” By the mid-1960s, she rivaled such fellow international stars as Sophia Loren and Catherine Denueve in worldwide popularity, but after starring in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1969), she retreated to European features, where she continued to hone her craft in films like Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). Fondly remembered by movie fans the world over for her equally dazzling looks and talent, Cardinale remained the definition of a true movie star for over five decades.
She was born Claude Josephine Rose Cardinale (pronounced “Car-din-arl-ay”) to French and Sicilian parents on April 15, 1938 in La Goulette, a predominately Italian neighborhood in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. She grew up speaking her mother’s native language, French, and Tunisian Arabic, and did not learn Italian until she began her acting career. Initially, Cardinale wanted to be a teacher, but after entering and winning a 1957 contest to find the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” her path to film stardom was set. The first prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where her earthy beauty captured the attention of the European press. After a two-month stint at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National film school), Cardinale made her feature film debut in Jacques Baratier’s “Goha” (1957), starring Omar Sharif. She then received a seven-year contract from Vides Cinematografica, a production company run by producer Franco Cristaldi who, like Cardinale, had been born in Tunis.
What Cristaldi did not know was that Cardinale was pregnant at the time of their meeting. The French father was in Tunisia, and had stated that he wanted nothing to do with his offspring. Realizing that to sign Cardinale in such a state would fly in the face of his company’s contract clauses which forbade weight gain and unnecessary fraternization, Cristaldi arranged for Cardinale to deliver the child, a boy named Patrick Frank, in London in 1958. He was then placed in the care of nuns in Italy until the age of 4 ½, when Cardinale’s family cared for him in Tunis. As part of the arrangement, the boy was told that Cardinale was his older sister, not her son. Meanwhile, Cristaldi had brought Cardinale back to Italy, where he began grooming her as a starlet in the mold of Brigitte Bardot. She earned her first international hit with Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958), a fizzy crime farce about a group of hapless criminals who attempt and fail to break into a pawnshop. Cardinale had a minor role as the object of desire, a young girl kept a virtual prisoner by her over-protective husband. A major hit around the world, “Big Deal” thrust Cardinale into the international spotlight.
Though many of Cardinale’s early roles were built largely around her physical attributes, she soon proved herself to be a capable dramatic and comedic actress in a wide variety of films for some of the most acclaimed Italian directors of the 1960s. In “Bell’Antonio” (1960), co-written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, she played the wife of Marcello Mastroianni, whose confusion over sex and love made him a renowned lover with strangers but impotent with her. Luchino Visconti cast her in a minor role in his iconic, neo-realist masterpiece “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960), and she gave a heartbreaking turn as a mistreated showgirl who became the romantic obsession of a teenage boy in Valerio Zurlini’s “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961). By 1963, she had appeared in two of the greatest titles in world cinema – Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963), in which she essentially played herself, an actress named Claudia cast by director Marcello Mastroianni as the “perfect woman,” and Visconti’s criminally underrated “The Leopard” (1963), as the object of unrequited passion by an Italian nobleman (Burt Lancaster) and his nephew (Alain Delon). These and other films helped to mint Cardinale as the thinking man’s sex symbol, and as an actress who could dazzle with her brain as well as her beauty. However, many moviegoers did not know that another actress dubbed her voice in nearly all of her films prior to 1963. At first, this was due to her rudimentary Italian, but as time wore on and her grasp of the language improved, producers continued to rely on dubbing because of her odd pronunciation – Cardinale was, in fact, speaking Italian with a French accent and in a surprisingly deep tone. The first time her actual voice was heard on film was in Fellini’s “8 1/2″.”
American audiences soon took notice of the actress as well, and she made her Hollywood debut in Blake Edwards’ “The Pink Panther” (1963) as a Middle Eastern princess whose prized possession – the titular jewel – is stolen by a master thief, “The Phantom” (David Niven), who is being sought out by Peter Sellers’ inept Inspector Clouseau. More Stateside features followed, including the thriller “Blindfold” (1965) with Rock Hudson, and Richard Brooks’ thrilling Western “The Professionals” (1966), with Cardinale as the wife of an American rancher (Ralph Bellamy) kidnapped by a Mexican bandit (Jack Palance), who is then pursued by a quartet of mercenaries led by Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. During this period, Cardinale also maintained her European career in such films as Visconti’s “Vaghe stele dell’Orsa” (“Stella”) (1965) in which she played a Holocaust survivor who returns to her home in Tuscany to re-ignite an incestuous relationship with her brother.
The following year, while filming the sex comedy “Don’t Make Waves” with Tony Curtis in Los Angeles, Cardinale revealed the truth about her son to the international press. She had fallen in love with her mentor, Cristaldi, who had applied to the Vatican to annul his marriage in order to wed Cardinale. The couple was married in Georgia before returning to Italy to break the news to Patrick. The announcement shocked many fans, but in interviews, both Cristaldi and Cardinale explained that the revelation was made to prevent any negative publicity from affecting the boy. Cardinale soon returned to making films on both sides of the Atlantic; some remarkable, while others modest regional hits or obscurities. The most acclaimed picture during this period was unquestionably Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), the sprawling coda to his “Dollars” trilogy of post-modern Westerns. She played Jill, the woman at the center of a violent, three-way power struggle between a hired gun (Henry Fonda), the mysterious stranger bent on killing him (Charles Bronson), and the bandit (Jason Robards) whom Fonda framed for the murder of Cardinale’s husband. Met with critical and audience disdain upon its release, “Once Upon a Time” was eventually regarded as Leone’s greatest work and one of the finest Westerns ever made.
After her work in the Leone film, Cardinale appeared almost exclusively in European features, many of which never reached American theaters. There were several notable films during this period, including 1969’s “The Red Tent,” an Italian/Soviet production about the 1928 crash of an Italian airship near the North Pole which starred Sean Connery and Peter Finch, and “Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata” (“A Girl in Australia”) (1971), a romantic comedy with Alberto Sordi which earned her a 1972 David for Best Actress. In 1977, she appeared on American television in Franco Zefferelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977) as the adulteress Jesus (Robert Powell) spared from stoning in the Gospel of John. The six-hour miniseries allowed her to return to her native Tunisia, which stood in for Jerusalem.
In 1981, Cardinale played Klaus Kinski’s lover, a brothel owner who finances his mad scheme to build an opera house along the Amazon River in Werner Herzog’s surreal “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). She remained a fixture of European film in the decades that followed, and continued to collaborate with the continent’s top directors, including Liliana Cavani in “The Skin” (1981), which reunited her with Burt Lancaster; Marco Bellocchio in “Henry IV” (1984); Diane Kurys in “A Man in Love” (1987); and Henri Verneuil, who cast her as the matriarch of an Armenian family who emigrates to France after the genocide of 1915 in “Mayrig” (1991) and its sequel, “588 rue paradis” (1992).
During this period, she recounted her lengthy and storied career in a 1995 autobiography, Moi, Claudia, toi, Claudia, and she was feted by award organizations and festivals around the world, including an honorary Golden Lion from the 1993 Venice Film Festival. Cardinale also lent her fame to UNESCO as a goodwill ambassador for the defense of women’s rights beginning in 1999. In 2002, Cardinale received an honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival. Three years later, she published a second book, Mes Etoiles, which recounted more stories from her life in front of the camera. Far from being retired, Cardinale continued to star in three to four films a year, including a critically acclaimed turn as a Tunisian mother unable to come to terms with her French-educated son’s homosexuality in “Le fil” (“The String”) (2009). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Today, little is written about Marta Toren but she had a fairly profilic Hollywood career. She was born in Stocholm in 1925. She began her career on the stage and then began making films in 1947. In 1949 she was in Hollywood and made “Illegal Entry” with Howard Duff, “Sword in the Desert” with Dana Andrews, “One Way Street” with James Mason, £Deported” with Jeff Chandler and “Sirocco” with Humphrey Bogart. By 1952 she was back in Sweden where she died in 1957 at the age of only 31. A page dedicated to Marta Toren on “Glamour Gils of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.
IMDB Entry:
From an early age her dream was to become an actress. Her first application for acting studies at The Royal Dramatic Theater in 1944 was unsuccessful. After additional dramatic coaching she was finally accepted in 1947. But screenwriter Edwin Blumarranged a screen test for RKO which eventually led to her being offered a contract with Universal Studios. It was a hard choice but she accepted and left her studies after one semester. In Hollywood she quickly made 10 movies, including Sirocco (1951) withHumphrey Bogart. From 1952 she accepted movie offers from Italy with more demanding roles. She married director Leonardo Bercovici on June 13, 1952, and gave birth to a daughter. In early 1957, she went back to Sweden for her stage debut in a play by J.B. Priestley. She died one month later, at the age of 31, of a brain hemorrhage.
