European Actors Archives - Page 27 of 29

Micheline Presle

Micheline Presle. IMDB.

Micheline Presle was born in Paris in 1922. She made her film debut in 1937 in “La Fessee”. She went to Hollywood in 1950 when she signed a contract with 20th Century Fox”. The U.S, films she made were “Under My Skin” with John Garfield and “An American Guerrilla in the Phillipines” with Tyrone Power. She was back in France in 1954 and quicly resestablished her position in French film making. In 1962 she returned to Hollywood to make “If A Man Answers” as Sandra Dee’s mother. She continues to act on film and her most recent appearance was in “Venus Beauty Institute”.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Dark-haired, Paris-born Micheline Presle (better known in the States as Micheline Prelle) was the daughter of a businessman and took acting classes as a teen. She was discovered by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and cast in Young Girls in Trouble (1939) (Young Girls in Distress) and Four Flights to Love (1940) in which she played a dual role.

Under My Skin, poster, John Garfield, Micheline Presle, 1950. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

She proceeded to make films during the Occupation, and by 1947, was deemed an important young French star, with Devil in the Flesh (1947) (Devil in the Flesh) gaining her world-wide attention. Her marriage to American actor-turned-producer William Marshall in 1950 led her to attempt Hollywood pictures. None of her pictures, which included Under My Skin (1950), American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950) and Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), the last one produced and directed by husband Marshall, endeared her to American audiences; however, despite co-starring opposite top Hollywood stars John Garfield, Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn. Divorced by 1954, she never adjusted to the Hollywood way of life and returned willingly to Paris with her daughter, actress/directorTonie Marshall.

She continued to reign supreme in French films and has appeared frequently on the stage as well. Some of her post-Hollywood films include House of Ricordi (1954) (House of Ricordi), Royal Affairs in Versailles (1954) (Royal Affairs in Versailles), Her Bridal Night (1956) (The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful), Demoniqque (1958), King of Hearts (1966) (King of Hearts), Donkey Skin (1970) (The Magic Donkey),Le journal du séducteur (1996) (Diary of a Seducer) and Les Misérables (1995).

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

2013 Video clip of Ms Presle here.

Many postwar British filmgoers had their perception of French women shaped by seeing such sophisticated stars as Edwige Feuillère, Danielle Darrieux and Micheline Presle on screen in the 1940s.

Presle, who has died aged 101, specialised in playing “the older woman”, starting while still only in her 20s with Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1947), in which a young wife has an affair with a schoolboy (Gérard Philipe). The film of Raymond Radiguet’s precocious semi-autobiographical novel caused outrage in some quarters for its sympathetic portrayal of lovers cuckolding a soldier away at war; in it Presle hinted at a breaking heart beneath the glittering surface of a woman of the world.

In Jean Delannoy’s Les Jeux Sont Faits (The Chips Are Down, 1947), based on an original screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre, Presle played a woman poisoned by her fascist husband who, in the afterlife, meets and falls in love with a communist killed in an uprising.

There was something in Presle’s performances that convinced Darryl F Zanuck, head of production at 20th Century Fox, to offer her a contract. However, as in many other cases, Hollywood was not sure how to handle its newly imported star. The first thing Zanuck did was to simplify her name for American audiences by changing it to Micheline Prelle, in case, he claimed, people thought Presle was pronounced like “pretzel”.

She made two films for Fox in 1950: Under My Skin, in which she was cast as a cabaret singer waiting for a crooked jockey (John Garfield) to reform; then she waited for Tyrone Power to return from defeating Japanese forces in Fritz Lang’s American Guerrilla in the Philippines.

In 1949 Presle had married the American actor/director William Marshall, who had previously been married to Michèle Morgan when she was also uncomfortably trying to make a career in Hollywood. They went on to have a daughter, Tonie. Marshall directed his new wife opposite a fading Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), a lame sea adventure, filmed in France where Presle remained, admitting that her “two years in Hollywood were two years too long.

Born in Paris, she was the daughter of Julie (nee Bachelier), an artist, and Robert Chassagne, a businessman. Micheline took acting lessons while still at school, and made her screen debut uncredited in La Fessée (The Spanking, 1937), then appeared under the name Micheline Michel in the Charles Trenetmusical Je Chante (1938).

A year later, appearing for the first time as Micheline Presle, she was given the lead in GW Pabst’s Jeunes Filles en Détresse (Young Girls in Trouble). Thereafter, Presle would work with most of the best French directors of the day. For Abel Gance, she played both a mother who dies in the war and her daughter, in the wildly melodramatic Paradis Perdu (Paradise Lost, 1939).

In Marcel L’Herbier’s La Nuit Fantastique (1942), Presle was alluring as a mysterious woman in white whom a student (Fernand Gravey) continually dreams about. He and she have a series of fantastic nocturnal adventures, some of which may be real. Presle continued to work during the wartime occupation of France, making a number of lighthearted romances. It was only after the liberation that she was able to display her dramatic talents to the full.

In Falbalas (Paris Frills, 1944), Jacques Becker’s withering look at the world of haute couture, Presle was a celebrated couturier who falls in love with her fiance’s best friend, played by Raymond Rouleau. Boule de Suif (1945), directed by Christian-Jaque, and based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, saw her give a dignified performance as Elizabeth Rousset, an exploited and shunned sex worker during the Franco-Prussian war. The film had a strong impact at the time because of its unmistakable resonances of the war and occupation.

After her trip to Hollywood and back, Presle plunged straight into roles more worthy of her – starting with the tragic Marguerite Gauthier in La Dame aux Camélias (1953), directed by the veteran Raymond Bernard. She had cameos in two of Sacha Guitry’s witty all-star extravaganzas, as Madame de Pompadour in Si Versailles m’Était Conté (Royal Affairs in Versailles, 1953) and as Hortense de Beauharnais in Napoléon (1954).

As she entered her 40s, Presle adapted to the directors of the French New Wave. In Philippe de Broca’s bitter-sweet boudoir comedy Infidelity (1961), she played a wealthy couturiere keeping the younger Jean-Pierre Cassel, until he leaves her for Jean Seberg, and she appeared in Jacques Demy’s Lust episode from The Seven Deadly Sins (1962).

She briefly returned to Hollywood when she played Sandra Dee’s mother, an ex-Folies Bergère chorus girl, in If A Man Answers (1962), and was a Nobel prize candidate in The Prize (1963), which starred Paul Newman.

Back in France, she had a role in Jacques Rivette’s controversial La Religieuse (The Nun, 1966), was Madame Eglantine in De Broca’s King of Hearts (1966) and the Red Queen in Demy’s fairytale Donkey Skin (1970).

Presle continued to work both in features and television into her 80s, appearing notably opposite Gérard Depardieu as the aged Madame de Saint-Méran in the TV miniseries The Count of Monte Cristo (1998), and in Venus Beauty (1999), a film revolving around a Paris beauty salon, which won a César award for its director, Presle’s daughter, Tonie.

Her marriage to Marshall ended in divorce. An earlier marriage, in 1945 to the tennis player Michel Lefort, had also ended in divorce, in 1949. Tonie died in 2020.

Micheline Presle (Micheline Nicole Julia Émilienne Chassagne), actor, born 22 August 1922; died 21 February 2024

Lilo Pulver was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1929. She undertook acting classes at the Bern conservatory.

She made her film debut in 1951 and by the end of that decade was starring in international films like “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” with John Gavin, “One, Two, Three” with James Cagney and Horst Buchholz and “A Global Affair” in 1963 with Bob Hope. Her final acting role was in 1986 in the mini-series “Le Tiroir secret”. Her “Wikipedia” page can be accessed here.

Article from Swiss Community:

That contagious laugh! No report about Liselotte (“Lilo”) Pulver is ever complete without reference to the ever-popular Swiss actress’s trademark laughter. Pulver’s 90^th birthday in October was no exception. Although Pulver has now withdrawn from public life and lives in a retirement home in Berne, her city of birth, she marked her big birthday with the publication of “Was vergeht, ist nicht verloren” (What passes is not lost) – a book containing personal memoirs based on old photos, letters and notes. Having kept all her mementos, Pulver – born in 1929 to middle-class parents – has now decided to tell the story of a long life that few could have expected. It was not until after visiting commercial college that the young Pulver was allowed to take acting lessons. She would go on to have a glittering international career. It was especially in post-war Germany where the smiling Swiss belle became a star of the silver screen, thanks to films like “I Often Think of Piroschka”. The Swiss public took her to their hearts in the 1950s, when she played the wholesome maid Vreneli in the Gotthelf adaptations “Uli the Farmhand” and “Uli the Tenant”. She later proved how talented and versatile an actress she was in the French New Wave film “The Nun” – and in American director Billy Wilder’s comedy “One, Two, Three”, in which she pulls off a dancing tabletop parody of Marilyn Monroe. In her private life, Pulver took some hard blows, with her daughter committing suicide and her husband dying of a heart attack. However, the 90-year-old recently denied press reports claiming that she was very lonely. “I am very satisfied with my life overall,” she said, adding that she still has plenty of reasons to burst into that legendary laughter every day

Nadia Gray was born in 1923 in Bucharest, Romania. Her film debut came with “L’inconniu d’un soir” in 1949. “The Spider and the Fly” was her breakthrough film and she went on to an international career. “Maniac” in 1963 with Kerwin Mathews was an intriguing mystery set in the Camargue in France. “Two for the Road” also set in France starred Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Gray was a sophiscated woman that Hepburn and Finney meet on their travels. In the late 60’s she met her husband an American lawyer and settled with him in New York. Nadia Gray died in 1994 at the age of seventy.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Born Nadia Kujnir-Herescu in Bucharest, Romania, on November 23, 1923, to a Russian father and a Bessarabian mother, the future actress Nadia Gray was raised there. She met first husband Constantin Cantacuzino (1905-1958), a Romanian aviator and noted WWII fighter ace, while she was a passenger on one of his commercial air flights. She couple fled the country during the Communist takeover of Romania in the late 1940s and emigrated to Paris. There Nadia enjoyed a vast international career as a Cosmopolitan lead and second lead on stage and in films. The couple eventually settled in Spain.

She made her film debut in a leading role as a young waitress who yearns to be a star in the French-Austrian co-production of L’inconnu d’un soir (1949) and went on to essay a number of more mature, sophisticated, glamorous patricians in European films, often a continental jetsetter or bourgeoisie type. Earlier roles that led to European stardom included her countess in Monsignor (1949), the woman in love with a thief in The Spider and the Fly (1949), and the role of Cristina Versini in the Italian technicolor biopic of the composer _Puccini (1952)_. Her roster of continental male co-stars went on to include such legendary stalwarts as Marcello Mastroianni, ‘Vittorio de Sica’, Rossano Brazzi, Errol Flynn, Maurice Ronet and Gabriele Ferzetti. Among her scattered appearances in English-speaking productions were a mixture of adventures, dramas, comedies and horrors including Valley of the Eagles (1951) with John McCallum and Jack Warner, Night Without Stars (1951) opposite David Farrar, The Captain’s Table (1959) starring John Gregson andDonald Sinden, I Like Money (1961) starring Peter Sellers, Maniac (1963) co-starringKerwin Mathews, The Naked Runner (1967) starring Frank Sinatra and a supporting role in the classic Albert Finney/Audrey Hepburn romance Two for the Road (1967). Nadia is most famous, however, for her cameo role toward the end of Federico Fellini‘s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960) as a bored and wealthy socialite who celebrates her divorce by performing a memorable mink-coated striptease during a jaded party sequence in her home.

Following the death of her first husband in Spain in 1958 (he was only 52), Nadia continued to film and settled permanently in America in the late 60s after meeting and marrying second husband Herbert Silverman, a New York lawyer. She retired from films completely in 1976 and began headlining as a singing cabaret star. The trend-setting Russian-Romanian beauty died of a stroke in Manhattan on June 13, 1994 at age 70 and was survived by her second husband and two stepchildren.

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

“The New York Times” obituary is here.

Lil Dagover was born in Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1887. At the age of ten, she was sent back to Europe to continue her education in Germany and Switzerland. She made her silent screen debut in 1913. By the early 1920’s she was one of the most prominent actresses of the Weimar Republic. In 1932 she went to Hollywood to make “The Woman from Monte Cristo” with Walter Huston. She returned to Germany and made films there through the 30’s and right through World War Two. Towards the end of her career she made two films directed by the Austrian actor Maximillian Schell. “The Pedestrian” also starred such venerable actresses as Peggy Ashcroft, Elisabeth Bergner and Francoise Rosay. “The End of the Game” starred Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland and Jacqueline Bisset. She died in 1980 in Munich at the age of 92. Her “Wikipedia” page is here.

Laya Raki was born in 1927 in Hamburg, Germany. Her parents were circus performers. Her first film in her native country was “Council of the Gods”. In 1954 she was given a contact in Britain by J. Arthur Rank and made “The Seekers” with Jack Hawkins and Glynis Johns in New Zealand. She starred in the television series “Crane ” opposite Patrick Allen in the title role. She was long married to the Australian actor Ron Randall. “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” page is here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Laya Raki was born in Hamburg, Germany,^[1] to acrobat Maria Althoff, and her partner, acrobat and clown Wilhelm Jörns. As she was an admirer of the famous dancer La Jana and liked to drink raki, she assumed the stage name Laya Raki.

The film company DEFA engaged her for a small role as a dancer in the film The Council of the Gods, which won two awards. One newspaper, the Berliner Morgenpost, wrote that she was a great dancer with an expressive face rich in nuances. In the same year the press department of Realfilm presented her as a new discovery in Die Dritte von rechts (“The Third from the Right”), a rather boring dance film, the highlight of which was the scene in which the scantily clad dancer Laya Raki (with only two white stars on her nipples) exposes herself to the lustful gazes of the male cinema audience. In 1953, she danced in the film Ehe für eine Nacht (“Marriage for One Night”). Her next film was Die Rose von Stambul (“The Rose of Stamboul”), in which the Austrian actor Paul Hörbiger wants to marry her upon seeing her dancing. In Roter Mohn (“Red Poppy”) she played the gypsy girl Ilonka who also conducted refreshing dialogues with the famous Viennese comic actor Hans Moser.he attracted attention for the first time in 1947–1950 as a dancer in Frankfurt and other German cities.

In 1954, she was lured to London by empty promises of film roles in the United Kingdom and in Hollywood. There she found herself unemployed, but her situation made headlines that opened opportunities. The J. Arthur Rank Film Company, which needed a slightly exotic type for a film in New Zealand, received her with open arms. She was given the role of the Māori chieftain’s seductive wife in “The Seekers” and created a worldwide stir by baring her breasts, 10 years before Rudi Gernreich‘s topless swimsuit. After having taken acting lessons in Hollywood, she appeared in several UK TV productions, including 39 episodes of the popular series Crane (1962–1965), which made her a well known actress. In it Laya Raki starred as Halima, a Moroccan dancer and bartender, who is the partner of the title character, the bar owner and smuggler Richard Crane, played by Patrick Allen.

She appeared in revealing outfits in film and photographs, and captured men’s attention like no other German showgirl in the 1950s. She modeled for postcards, pin-up photographs and magazines all over the world. The Broadway columnist Earl Wilson noted her preference for scanty clothing: “You should have seen Laya Raki. Even if she is dressed, she looks like, as if she only wears the zipper and has forgotten the material”. Of course he placed some photos of her in “Earl Wilson’s Album of Showgirls (1st Issue! 1956)”.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Actress Laya Raki with husband Ron Randell attend the world premiere of Zulu, which was held at the Plaza Theatre in London. The premiere was in aid of the Benevolent Funds of the Regiments of Wales and the Army Benevolent Fund. (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)

2018

Laya Raki Randell-Wood passed away peacefully in the evening of December 21, 2018, in Hollywood, California.

She was born Brunhilde Marie Jorns in Hamburg, Germany on July 27, 1927. Her mother left when Laya was only five years old. Her father remarried soon thereafter. He worked with the circus, where Laya learned acrobatics at a very young age, and performed in several circus acts. In her late teens, she partnered with fellow acrobat, Ricardo U. Partnerin, performing a 2-person dance/acrobatic act.

From there, she learned ballet and other forms of dance. She developed a passion for dance, and was best known for her exotic dances. She performed throughout NW Europe and Italy in the 1940’s to 1950. She adopted the screen name, ‘Laya Raki’, at the suggestion of her manager. In 1954, she got a major part in the movie, ‘The Seekers’, (released in the U.S. as, ‘Land of Fury’), as the exotic Moari dancer, longside actor Jack Hawkins. It was shot in New Zealand, and was a big hit, bringing Laya into the spotlight.

In 1955 Laya went to London to continue her acting career. Her roles in British films and TV productions made her an international star. She gained fame and recognition for her role in the popular British TV series, ‘Crane’. In order to appear more exotic to her viewing public, she invented a story that her mother was of Indonesian/French descent. While working in London, she met a handsome Australian actor, Ron Randell. It was love at first sight. They married in September, 1957 in London. Ron was doing films in both Australia and the United States. They decided to move to the U.S. in the 1960’s, working between New York City and Los Angeles. Laya appeared in the popular TV series, ‘I Spy’, and other shows over the years in Los Angeles.

Ron, died from Alzheimer’s related problems in June of 2005. In April of 2009, Laya married Duane Wood, retired Vice President of Lockheed Aircraft International. Laya is preceded in death by her father, Wilhelm Jorns in 1963, and her brother Alvin, her first husband, Ron Randell, and second husband Duane Wood in July of 2018. She is survived by her step-daughter, Cathy, and her step-grandchildren, Tyler and Shannon.

She will be laid to rest beside her first husband, Ronald Randell, at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park.

Sonja Henie was born in 1912 in Oslo, Norway to a very wealthy family. From an early age she practiced ice skating and she was a competitor in the 1924 Winter Olympics at the age of eleven. She won her third Olympic title at he 1936 Games. After the Games she became a professional ice skater. While performing in Los Angeles she was signed to a contract by 20th Century Fox. Her first film was “One in a Million”. The peak of her cinema career was between 1936 and 1943 and her films included “Thin Ice”, “Happy Landings”, “Sun Valley Serenade”, “Iceland” and “Wintertime”. She was a hugely popular star and made ice skating also popular. Ten years later Esther Williams was to do the same thing with swimming. Sonja Henie concentrated on ice skating revues after her film career waned. She retired from ice skating in 1956. She invested wisely and was a very wealthy woman when she died while en route by place to Oslo in 1969 at the age of 57.

TCM Overview:

Winner of the Olympic Gold medal in figure skating an impressive three times in a row (1928, 1932, 1936), Henie came to Twentieth Century-Fox shortly after her last win and was built up as a popular star. Nearly a dozen light musical comedies offered the blonde and dimpled Henie plenty of opportunities to don her blades and perform in lavish ice ballets while her leading men beamed and a cast of supporting comics clowned around. When her film career petered out in the mid-1940s she turned to performing in live ice shows.

“Vanity Fair” article on Sonja Henie can be accessed here.

Madys Christians was born in Vienna, Austria in 1892. She made her first film “The Black Hussar” in Germany in 1932. In Hollywood four years later she starred in “Come and Get It” with Frances Farmer. On Broadway she had an enourmous success with “I Remember Mama” in 1944. On film she had fine roles in 1948 in “All My Sons” and “A Letter to an Unknown Woman” which was directed by Max Ophuls. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and died in 1951.

From All Movie Guide: Primarily an actress of the European and American stage, she also appeared in many German and Hollywood films. Christians came to the U.S. in 1912 to appear with her parents in a German-speaking theater they established in New York. After making one film in the States, Audrey (1916), she returned to Germany to study with Max Reinhardt. In the ’20s she starred in numerous German plays and films, plus a few Broadway productions. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, she returned to America for good, shuttling between Hollywood and Broadway. In films she tended to play supporting character parts, while on stage she continued to find lead roles. Late in her career she was blacklisted after being labeled a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy-era “witch trials.” ~ Rovi

Jean-Marc Barr TCM Overview

Jean-Marc Barr was born in 1960 in Germany. His father was American and served in the military in the Second World War. He began working in theatre in France in 1986. John Boorman cast him in “Hope and Glory” with Sarah Miles the following year. Then he had amajor role in the very succesful “The Big Blue”. He has made several films with the Danish director Lars von Trier including “Europa”, “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogsville”. 2013 interview with Jean-Marc Barr here.

TCM Overview:

Extraordinarily handsome, classically trained actor who made his film debut as Absalom in Bruce Beresford’s 1985 biblical bomb, “King David.” Fluent in several languages, Barr earned his first leading role as champion diver Jacques Mayol in Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue” (1988), a huge hit in France which failed to find an international audience.

He enjoyed more success on the arthouse circuit with his fine work as the hapless hero of Lars von Trier’s stunning WWII film, “Zentropa” (1991). Barr also did well as an American scholar who travels to Tahiti to do research on Gaugin and forms an odd relationship with an amiable con man in “The Imposters” (1994), and reteamed with von Trier for the striking epic romance “Breaking the Waves” (1996).

Daily Telegraph obituary in 2016.

Michèle Morgan, who has died aged 96, was one of France’s top film stars of the 1940s and 1950s; said to have the most beautiful eyes in cinema, her career might have been still more stellar had a studio wrangle not caused her to lose the lead in Casbalanca to Ingrid Bergman,

She shot to fame at 17 with her first important role in Gribouille (1937) as a young woman on trial for murdering her lover. Its impact was such that RKO offered her a Hollywood contract but Morgan preferred to stay in France. Marcel Carné’s proto-noir Le Quai de Brumes created even more of a stir the next year, pairing runaway waif Morgan, in a beret and trenchcoat, opposite Jean Gabin’s deserter.

“You know you have beautiful eyes,” he says. “Kiss me,” she replies. By the time of Remorques (1940), she and the newly-divorced Gabin were an item on and off-screen and they left for America together after the German invasion. There he left Michèle Morgan for Marlene Dietrich and she discovered that RKO did not know what to do with her.

“Hollywood crushed my personality,” she said later. “They tried to make me look like everybody else – and then they photographed me badly.” Yet even so her clear blue, Garboesque gaze had got her noticed. Hitchcock wanted her for Suspicion but her poor English counted against her (“I said ‘crying trees’ for ‘weeping willows’”). She was also first choice for Ilsa Lund in Casablanca but Warners refused to pay the loan fee that RKO demanded.

She did get to star with Bogart in the forgettable Passport to Marseille (1944) and in Frank Sinatra’s acting debut, Higher and Higher. In 1942, she married another singer-turned-actor, William Marshall, but when they separated after only a few years she returned to France with their son.

Marshall later married Ginger Rogers. Meanwhile in 1946, Michèle Morgan re-established her réclame by being named best actress at the first Cannes Film Festival for her role as a blind orphan in La symphonie pastorale. She also featured as the girlfriend of butler Ralph Richardson in Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948).

Two decades later, the French-style farmhouse house that she and Marshall had built in Los Angeles was the site of the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, and four others by members of Charles Manson’s gang.

The eldest of four, Michèle Morgan was born Simone Renée Roussel at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, on February 29 1920. Her father was a perfume company executive but the crash of 1929 ruined him and the family moved to Dieppe. There he opened a grocer’s. This soon failed and at 15 Simone ran away to Paris to live with her grandparents. They paid for acting lessons and she changed her name in 1937, saying she did not have the body of a Simone.

She was at the peak of her fame in the 1950s, and was 10 times voted France’s most popular actress. She played a series of historical heroines – Joan of Arc, Josephine Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette – before showing towards the end of the decade in Marguerite de la Nuit and The Mirror has Two Faces that she could portray darker figures.

The advent of the New Wave largely ended her career and she concentrated thereafter on painting and briefly on a tie-making business. Her last role of note was in Claude Lelouch’s Cat and Mouse.

“I have never had the opportunity to play sexy women,” she reflected. “I must believe that my charm was not in my arse.”

She was predeceased by her third husband, the director Gérard Oury, and by her son.

Michèle Morgan, born February 29 1920, died December 20 2016