European Actors

Collection of Classic European Actors

Milly Vitale
  • Milly Vitale was a very pretty actress who was born in Rome in 1933.   Her first film was “The Brothers Karamazov” in 1947.   She was featured in a number of Italian films when she was given the role of Kirk Douglas’s leading lady in “The Juggler” in 1953.   Two years later she was brought to Hollywood to star opposite Bob Hope in “The Seven Little Foys”.   She only made the one film in the U.S. and then returned to Europe.   She was in the epic “War and Peace”.  She was excellent as the World War Two freedom fighter in “The Battle of the V.I.” with Michael Rennie and Patricia Medina.    She retired from acting in the 1970’s.   Milly Vitale died in 2006.   Her link on “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia entry:

Camilla “Milly” Vitale (16 July 1933, Rome, Italy – 2 November 2006, Rome, Italy) was an Italian actress. She was the daughter of conductor Riccardo Vitale and choreographer Natasha Shidlowski.

She appeared in numerous post-war Italian films. She appeared in a few Hollywood movies but never achieved star status like her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. In her most notable U.S. role, she appeared with Bob Hope as “Madeleine Morundo Foy” in The Seven Little Foys (1956). War and Peace    She married Vincent Hillyer, a United States citizen, in 1960; the marriage produced two sons, Edoardo and Vincent Jr. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. Vitale retired from acting in the 1970s, after a career of more than 47 films.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters
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Gerard Blain

Gerard Blain was born in Paris in 1930.   His first film was “Les Mstons” in 1957.   He wnet on to make “Les Cousins” in 1959.   Three years later he attempted an international career with “Hatari” with John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli.   However he did not have an international career and he was soon back in French movies.   In his last film he played a priest in “Love Bandits”.   Gerard Blain died in 2000.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

For those who believe that the French New Wave was as seismic an event in cinema as the coming of sound, Gérard Blain, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a key figure. In fact, one could say that he was the first face of the New Wave.

The face was young, handsome and sensitive. The short-statured Blain resembled James Dean in looks and persona, and became the favourite of young critics on the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who decided, in their battle against the “cinéma du papa”, to make films themselves.

François Truffaut chose Blain and his wife, Bernadette Lafont, to play young lovers in the director’s first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot rapidly in Nmes one summer, Blain and Lafont obsess a group of pubescent boys, who spy on their lovemaking in the fields.

Blain was also in one of Jean-Luc Godard’s first shorts, Charlotte et Son Jules (1958), and was picked to play the title role in arguably the very first New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1959). In it, theology student Jean-Claude Brialy (another iconic actor of the period) returns to his native village to find that his talented childhood friend, Blain, has become a hopeless drunk and is estranged from his pregnant wife (Lafont). Blain, in his first leading role, brilliantly expressed the pain of the disappointed character.

Chabrol cast the same two male leads in his second feature, Les Cousins (1959), a riveting and perverse study of decadent Parisian student life. Blain was perfect as the simple, good-hearted country cousin who comes to study at the Sorbonne, while staying at the luxury apartment of his cynical cousin (Brialy).

Blain, who was abandoned as a child by his stable-lad father, was born in Paris. He had been an extra in a few films before director Julien Duvivier discovered the 25-year-old standing at the bar of a cafe in the Champs-Elysées, and gave him a role in Voici Les Temps Des Assassins (1955), starring the great Jean Gabin.

After the two Chabrol features, Blain starred in a number of Italian films, de rigueur for many actors of the 1960s, notably Carlo Lizzani’s The Hunchback Of Rome (1960). He also appeared in the gossip columns because of his stormy marriage and divorce from Bernadette Lafont.

When making Les Mistons, Truffaut noted: “Gérard is, I think, very unhappy. He bellyaches because I prefer Bernadette in high heels; he has a Toulouse-Lautrec complex. And then he’s come to realise that Bernadette is completely at home in front of the camera, and he makes a scene every day.”

Actually, Blain never felt completely at ease as an actor, and hankered to direct, although he had to wait some years before he could do so. In the meanwhile, he was part of the international cast of Howard Hawks’s Hatari! (1962), about a group of African hunters, led by John Wayne, who catch animals for zoos. Blain was one of a number of leading French actors in the boulevard comedy La Bonne Soupe (1963), and played a resistance fighter who refuses to execute a traitor in Costa-Gavras’s Shock Troops (1968).

Blain, whose idols were the ascetic Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, directed the first of eight films, Les Amis, in 1970. Labelled Bressonian, his pictures were uncompromising studies of domestic crises, often seen from the child’s point of view, which led critics to suspect they were autobiographical. Generally, critics were favourable to him, but the films seldom made money and had distribution problems.

The fact that Blain was a difficult man to work with, and refused to compromise his principles, did not help matters. There was also his ambiguous friendship with members of the National Front, which cast a shadow over Pierre et Djemila (1987), a film which seemed anti-Arab, although the screenplay was written by Mohamed Bouchibi, formerly of the FLN.

Blain, who remarried and had two sons, found his last years particularly difficult. Faced with illness and debt, he still managed to work, and his final film, Ainsi-soit-il (So Be It, 1999), could be seen as a chronicle of his death foretold.

• Gérard Blain, actor and director, born October 23 1930; died December 17 2000

“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

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Magda Schneider
Magda Schneider
Magda Schneider

Magda Schneider was born in 1909 in Bavaria, Germany.   She made her stage debut in Munich.   In 1937 she married Austrian actor  Wolf Albach-Retty .   The following year she gave birth to her daughter Romy Schneider.   She made her film debut in 1932 in “Tell Me Tonight”.   In 1953 she made the film “When the White Lilacs Bloom Again”.   She supported her daughter when Romy made the “Sissi” trilogy.   Magda Schneider died in 1996.   Magda Schneider’s obituary in “The New York Times” here.

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Martine Carol
Martine Carol

Martine Carol was born in 1920 in France.   Her first film role was in 1943.   She was a famous French film symbol of her day, predating Brigitte Bardot by a few years.   Her most famous role is the title role “Lola Montes£ directed by Max Ophuls in 1955.   Another of her films was  “Action oif the Tiger” with Van JOhnson and a young Sean Connery.   Martine Carol died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1967.

Martine Carol’s minibiography on the IMDB website:

France’s major sex siren of the early 50s, this lesser-remembered post-war French pastry pre-dated bombshell Brigitte Bardot by a few years but her brief reign did not compare and has not lived up to the Bardot era. The cult mystique is not there even after dying mysteriously and relatively young. Martine was born Marie-Louise Mourer on May 16, 1920 (some references indicate 1922), but little is known of her childhood. A chance meeting with comedian Andre Luguet steered her toward a career in the theatre. Trained by Rene Simon, she made her 1940 stage debut with “Phedre” billed as Maryse Arley. She subsequently caught the eye of Henri-Georges Clouzot who hired her for his film “The Cat,” based on the novel by Colette, but the project was scrapped. Nevertheless, she did attract attention in the movie Wolf Farm (1943), which takes advantage of her photogenic beauty and ease in front of the camera despite a limited acting ability. A pin-up goddess and support actress throughout the 40s, Martine also appeared on the stage of the Theater of the Renaissance. A torrid affair with actor Georges Marchal, who was married to actress Dany Robin at the time, ended disasterously and she attempted suicide by taking an alcohol/drug overdose and throwing herself into the Seine River. She was saved by a taxi driver who accompanied her there. Ironically, the unhappy details surrounding her suicide attempt renewed the fascination audiences had with Martine up until that time. In 1950 she scored her first huge film success with the French Revolution epic Caroline Cherie (no doubt prompted by her seminude scenes and taunting, kittenish sexuality) and she was off and running at the box office. Her film romps were typically done tastefully with an erotic twinge of innocence and gentle sexuality plus an occasional bubble bath thrown in as male bait. She continued spectacularly with an array of costumed teasers such as Adorable Creatures (1952), Sins of the Borgias (1953), Madame du Barry (1954) and Nana (1954), all guided and directed by second husband Christian-Jacque, whom she married in 1954. A true feast for the eyes and one of the most beautiful actresses of her time, Martine later divorced the director due to professional conflicts and long separations. One last memorable part would come to her as the title role in Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955) portraying a circus performer who entrances all around her. By the mid 50s, Bardot had replaced Martine on the goddess pedestal and the voluptuous blonde’s career went into a severe decline. Although such mature roles as Empress Josephine in The Battle of Austerlitz (1960) and others followed, nothing revived audience interest. Depressed, Martine turned alarmingly reclusive while a third marriage to French doctor Andre Rouveix also soured by 1962. Problems with substance abuse and a severe accident in the 60s also curtailed her career dramatically. Her last film Hell Is Empty was made in 1963 but not released until 1967. One last marriage to fourth husband Mike Eland, an English businessman and friend of first hubby Steve Crane, seemed hopeful, but on February 6, 1967, Martine died of cardiac arrest at age 46 in the bathroom of a hotel in Monacco Her husband discovered her. She was buried in the cemetery of Cannes.

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

This minibiography can also be accessed online at IMDB here.

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Luise Rainer

The amazine Luise Rainer is still going strong at 100 years old.   She recently flew from her home in London to Los Angeles for a TCM celebration of her work on film.   Her career in Hollywood was very brief but within that time in the 1930’s, she won two back-to-back Oscars, the only actress to have achieved this distinction.   She was born in 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany.   She began her acting career under the tutalege of Max Reinhardt in Vienna and was spotted there by an MGM talent scout and brought to Hollywood in 1936.   Her two Oscars were for “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Good Earth”.   However she was very unhappy in Hollywood and by 1940 she had moved to New York.   She subsequently moved to London.   She made intermittent film and television appearances over the years.   Gradually film writers became aware that she was one of the last surviving stars of the Golden Era and she has become much sought after as a witty, interesting interviewee.   Luise Rainer died at the age of 104 in December 2014.

This article by Kate Webb in “Culture” in “Aljazeera America”can also be accessed online here.

Her “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:

There are very few actors whose culture and friendships ranged so widely, and who knew so many of the great names of the 20th century, as Luise Rainer, who has died aged 104. She was married for three tempestuous years to the radical American playwright Clifford Odets; she was a key member of Max Reinhardt’s theatre company; she was the lover of the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller; Bertolt Brecht wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle for her. She is frequently mentioned in the diaries of the writer Anaïs Nin, who was fascinated by her; she was an intimate of Erich Maria Remarque and Albert Einstein; Federico Fellinibegged her to be in La Dolce Vita; and George Gershwin gave her a first edition of the score of Porgy and Bess, with a fulsome dedication to her from the composer.

In addition, Rainer was the first movie star to win a best actress Oscar in successive years, the first for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and the second for The Good Earth (1937). And yet, she lived the latter part of her life in comparative obscurity in London, under the name Mrs Knittel.

Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, of well-to-do parents: Heinz Rainer, a German-American businessman, and his wife Emmy (nee Königsberger), a pianist from an upper-class German-Jewish family. Luise, who had dark, expressive eyes in a mobile, wistful face topped by a mass of shiny black hair, was her father’sAugapfel, the apple of his eye. However, she also experienced what she described as his “tyrannical possessiveness”.

Feeling lost and out of place in an “average bourgeois surrounding”, she sought solace in the arts: “I was always very rebellious. I felt constricted. My rebellion was against the superficial. My wealthy parents were both immensely musical and cultured, but my father wanted me to marry and have children.” At 16, she made up her mind to go on the stage. “I became an actress only because I had quickly to find some vent for the emotion that inside of me went around and around, never stopping. I would have been happy instead of turning to the stage, to write, to paint, to dance, or, like my mother, to play the piano beautifully.”

Behind closed doors, she studied the part of Lulu in Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind. After she auditioned at the theatre in Düsseldorf, no one could believe that she had had no previous training. “I could feel the warmth and the love coming to me from the audience and yet I could remain at a protective distance. It was what I needed.”

Her parents refused to see her act, and were horrified when she took the leading role in Wedekind’s then-shocking Spring Awakening. Thereafter she appeared in a number of productions, many with Reinhardt’s company, including Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, for which she was praised personally by the playwright. A newspaper dubbed her “the wunderkind of drama”. At the time, Toller was in love with her. “He was nothing to me but a man. I was in my teens, and his fame didn’t mean anything to me. But I had no room for him in my life because there were so many other men in love with me at the time.”

An MGM talent scout saw Rainer performing in a Viennese production of An American Tragedy in 1934, and she was immediately signed to a seven-year contract as the studio’s secret weapon to keep Greta Garbo in line. So, in 1935, in her late teens, speaking fluent French and German, but little English, Rainer arrived in Hollywood. Her first film for the studio, the spy drama Escapade (1935), in which she replaced Myrna Loy as a Viennese girl opposite William Powell, made her a star.

Her new-found status triggered her first clash with the studio boss Louis B Mayer. He wanted to loan her to 20th Century-Fox to co-star with Ronald Colman in The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Rainer talked him into giving her a much smaller role in the new Powell picture. “There’s this little scene I think I can do something with,” she told him. This “little scene” – which Mayer ordered out after the first previews but later restored – was the short, poignant telephone scene from The Great Ziegfeld. “I wrote the scene myself,” Rainer stated, “though I stole it from Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine.” As Anna Held, she telephones her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld to congratulate him on his marriage. It was enough to sway the voters of the Academy and it also established Rainer as an expert exponent of the laughter-through-tears school of acting.

The following year, Rainer made an exceptional jump to the role of the downtrodden Chinese peasant woman O-Lan in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel. She works silently in the fields with her husband, bears his children, begs for food during the famine, and dies quietly years later when the family has achieved some prosperity. When it was shown to the Chinese government, Madame Chiang Kai-shek reportedly could not believe Rainer was not herself Chinese, and Buck later wrote: “I was much moved by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer … marvelling at the miracle of her understanding.”

But so convinced was Rainer that she had no chance of winning the coveted Oscar for the second year running that on the night of the ceremony she stayed at home in her pyjamas. At 8.35pm, the names of the winners were given to the press, and a member of the Academy telephoned her to tell her she had won. She had to change quickly into evening dress and dash across town with Odets, whom she had married the previous year, to receive her second statuette. That night, she recalled, she and Odets were having a terrific row. She was in tears by the time they got to the Biltmore hotel, and they had to walk around the building five times before she had calmed down sufficiently to go in and accept the award.

Rainer never made big money in Hollywood. She had opportunities to increase her salary, but was disinclined to accept the method of negotiation offered by Mayer. The mogul said to her: “Why don’t you sit on my lap when we’re discussing your contract, the way the other girls do?” The fiery Rainer told him to throw her contract in the bin. “We made you and we’re going to kill your career,” Mayer roared. She replied: “Mr Mayer, I was already a star on the stage before I came here. Besides, God made me, not you!”

Thereafter her films were mediocre, except for The Great Waltz (1938), though her part as Johann Strauss’s wife was considerably trimmed. A nonconformist, Rainer walked around Hollywood in slacks, wearing no make-up, her hair in disarray at the height of 1930s glamour. She also decided to expend her energies elsewhere than on her film career. She helped refugee children from Spain and later, with the US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, assisted European victims of Nazi Germany.

When her disastrous marriage to Odets ended in divorce in 1940, she was living in New York. There she became friendly with Nin, famous for her erotica and her passionate affair with the writer Henry Miller. “My strongest impression when I met her [Rainer] was that you were twins of a sort,” Miller wrote to Nin. “Neither of you belong in this world.” After Nin attended a play in which Rainer was performing, she wrote long descriptions of the actor in her diary. Rainer becomes a “flame” when she performs, says Nin, and certainly “would have been loved by [the French playwright Antonin] Artaud”.

Before she left Hollywood, Rainer was told by Brecht that he would like to write a play for her. She suggested an adaptation of Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle) by AH Klabund, based on a Chinese tale, which became The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Later, she and the playwright fell out, and she never performed in it.

Soon after, in 1945, Rainer retreated into a long and happy marriage with the publisher Robert Knittel. They travelled extensively and lived for many years in Switzerland. She became a mother, painted and did a play from time to time, notably Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which she played Nina. But for most people, Rainer had disappeared from the public eye.

In the late 50s, Rainer and her family moved to Britain. She appeared in some television plays on the BBC, including Stone Faces (1957), a play written for her by JB Priestley. She also played Regina in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where she had performed with Reinhardt many years before. In 1973, she took the taxing part of the narrator in Honegger’s oratorio Judith, in French, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with Jessye Norman singing the soprano part.

In 1997, she was enticed into returning to the big screen for the first time in over half a century in The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky. Though the film received lukewarm reviews, Rainer was universally praised. According to Variety: “The pic briefly gets a real lift when the legendary Luise Rainer bursts on the scene in a wonderfully showy part as a gambling-addicted granny.”

When I met Rainer at her London flat in 1996, she was an incredibly energetic 86-year-old whom I recognised as the same woman described by Miller as having “wonderful gesture and bearing, such a gracious way of carrying her head, such delicacy”, and the intense and dark eyes that shone from the screen over half a century before.

She is survived by her daughter, Francesca.

• Luise Rainer, actor, born 12 January 1910; died 30 December 2014

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

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Lambert Wilson

Lambert Wilson is the son of actor Georges Wilson.   he was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France in 1958.   He had a major role in Fred Zinnemann’s “Five Days, One Summer” with Sean Connery in 1982.   His other movies include The Matrix” films, “The Last September” and “Sahara”.   TCM Overview:This lanky leading man has emerged as one of France’s more prominent exports of the 1980s.

Lambert Wilson. TCM Overview

The son of actor Georges Wilson–the father directed his son in “La vouivure” (1986)–Lambert Wilson starred as the destructive Quentin in Andre Techine’s psychodrama “Rendez-vous” and as the cynical photographer in Vera Belmont’s nostalgic “Rouge Baiser” (both 1985). He also appeared as the adulterous Caspasian Speckler in Peter Greenaway’s “The Belly of an Architect” (1987) and made a move toward US stardom as the Marquis de Lafayette in the Merchant-Ivory production “Jefferson in Paris” (1995). In John Duigan’s “The Leading Man” (1997), Wilson had the major role of a playwright who hires an actor (Jon Bon Jovi) to seduce his wife (Anna Galiena). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Actor Lambert Wilson and Editor in Chief Olga Rodianova
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Anouk Aimee

“From time to time Anouk Aimee has been on the verge of great success in American or British films.   She has been flirted with more than most of her compatriots but she has never responded with much enthusiasm.   ‘ I was never an actress with a flame’ she said once.   She admits to having lost all interest in her career when her daughter was born in 1951 and probably not have persevered at all had her romantic life gone smoothly.   She might have disappeared from public view years ago had not producers and directors sought her out: for even when she is not trying, she has something of the same magical femininity as Ingrid Bergman” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars 2 – International Years” (1972)

Anouk Aimee was born in Paris in 1932.   She made her film debut in 1947 in “La Maison sous le mer”.   Three years later she made her UK debut on film in “Golden Salamander” with Trevor Howard.   She starred in “La Dolca Vita” and “Lola”.   In 1966 she had a giant international hit with “A Man and a Woman”.   This resulted in offers from Hollywood and she made “Model Shop” and “Justine” in the U.S.   She then retunred to European film making.

“Jewish Woman’s Chronicle:

Anouk Aimée is perhaps best known for her remarkable presence as an icon of cool, sophisticated beauty in more than seventy films across seven decades, including such classics as Alexandre Astruc’s Le Rideau Cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain, 1952), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1963), André Delvaux’s Un Soir, un Train (One Evening, One Train, 1968), George Cukor’s Justine (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994) and, most unforgettably, Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966) opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant—a film that virtually reignited the lush on-screen romance in an era of skeptical modernism. Words like “regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic” are frequently associated with her, giving Aimée an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a 1995 poll conducted by Empire Magazine).Her striking features are known to many who have never seen her films. The much-vaunted comparison with Jacqueline Kennedy is more than physical; film historian Ginette Vincendeau notes that Aimée’s films “established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering.”

While little is known of her Jewish background, it is in one of her most recent roles as a Holocaust survivor returning to Auschwitz, in Marceline Loridan’s directorial debut (at age seventy-five), La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees, 2002), that Anouk Aimée brilliantly dramatizes her identity as a Jewish woman. Herself only a young girl during the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime, each with its specific program of antisemitic persecution, Aimée is a perfect fit for Loridan’s autobiographical work. (Loridan was a fourteen-year-old inmate of Auschwitz). At the New York City screening of the film in the spring of 2003, Aimée was still reticent about her own life during the war (she referred to a relative who had been deported and killed but stopped short of saying what she herself experienced), yet she spoke with eloquence and animation about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.

Anouk Aimée was born Françoise Sorya on April 27, 1932 in Paris. Both her parents were actors; her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was not Jewish, but her father, Henry Dreyfus (who used the name Henry Murray professionally), was. There may be some connection to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but this has never been elaborated. She was referred to variously as Françoise Sorya, Françoise Dreyfus or Nicole Dreyfus until her acting career (begun when she was just fourteen, with a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer [The House by the Sea, 1947]) earned her the name by which she is known. At first she was simply Anouk, taken from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La Fleur de l’âge (The Flower of the Age); it was the poet Jacques Prévert, writing André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona, 1949) specifically for her, who playfully added the symbolic last name that would forever associate her with the affective power of her screen roles.Already talented as a child, Aimée studied acting and ballet in Paris, London and Marseilles; her training in dance at the famous Bauer-Therond school prepared her for future roles as a performer in such films as Lola and The Model Shop (Demy, 1969).

Anouk Aimée has been making films all her life; during the 1980s and 1990s, when other actresses had difficulty finding roles for “mature” women, she made one film a year and she continues now into the twenty-first century. (“You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older,” she said in 1988.)

In 2003 she was awarded an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world.” Even though she has been referred to as “ageless,” “a legend,” and “a goddess of cinema mythology,” quite possibly her role in The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees (based on the real-life experience of its maker, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, as a teenage prisoner in Birkenau), so close to her own experience as a Jewish woman who comes to terms with her wartime past, contributed to the way she sees herself now, as an icon of world peace and reconciliation rather than the enigmatic diva of the European art cinema.

Her career can be roughly divided into three phases—the early arthouse avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s in which she defined a new kind of modern heroine; the period of international stardom, initiated by the Academy Award nomination and Best Foreign Film award and the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme and marked by work with many of world cinema’s most talented directors; and the phase of the committed woman, still beautiful but less concerned with screen presence than with using her position and her fame to make a difference in the world. Her three marriages loosely correspond to these time periods; she was briefly married to director Nikos Papatakis (1951–1954), then to composer Pierre Barouh (Baruch) from 1966 to 1969 (who appeared with her when she received the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme), and finally to actor Albert Finney (1970–1978), when she seems to have semi-retired from acting for a while.

But it is as a single woman for the last twenty-five years that Aimée has solidified her reputation both as a major actress with international appeal and as a champion of human rights. She lives in the Montmartre section of Paris with her daughter Manuela, continuing to demonstrate her “distinctive combination of melancholy and passion” in films that match the intensity of her beauty with the complexity of mature roles..

 

Guardian obituary in june 2024

 

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Alain Delon

Alain Delon

 

Alain Delon

Alain Delon TCM Overview

 

His website here.  Alain Delon is regarded as a giant of French cinema.   In the sixties he attempted Hollywood but by the end of the decade he resumed his career in Europe.   He was born in 1935 in Sceaux, France.   At a young age he joined the military and spent some time in Indochina.   He was noticed by a talent scout in Cannes and in 1957 in “Sois Belle et Tais-toi”.   In 1960 he made an international breakthrough with Rene Clement’s “Purple Noon”.   Luchino Visconti cast him in “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard”.   In 1964 he went to Hollywood to make “Once A Thief” opposite Ann-Margret.   In 1970 he had a major hit with “Borsalino”

TCM overview:

One of the great cinematic anti-heroes of the 1960s and 1970s, French actor Alain Delon brought a sense of daring and insouciant charm to his portrayals of gangsters, hired guns and men of mystery in such international hits as “Purple Noon” (1961), “Le Samourai” (1967), “The Sicilian Clan” (1969) and “Monsieur Klein” (1976). That he appeared, at least in part, to live an outlaw life off the screen as well, with multiple high-profile affairs and alleged connections to organized crime, only furthered his appeal to moviegoers on both sides of the Atlantic, who were drawn to his icy, implacable calm and Gallic bravado. On occasion, he ventured to Hollywood, but the results were frequently subpar; viewers were not interested in seeing Delon play for laughs opposite Dean Martin in “Texas Across the River” (1964) or as a cardboard hero in “Concorde Airport ’79” (1979). He was best served in his native country, where he dominated the box office well into the 1980s before pulling in the reins to focus on marketing his name through a variety of products. On occasion, the lure of the silver screen proved too strong to resist, and he would return to acting on several occasions during the ’90s and early 2000s. Though his famous mane of hair was silvered and the smoothness of his face marked by time, Delon’s extraordinary magnetism remained untouched by the decades – irrefutable proof of his status as one of France’s most enduring leading men.

 

Born Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon on Nov. 8, 1935 in the town of Sceaux, outside of Paris, France, he was the son of Fabien Delon, and his wife, Edith. His parents divorced when Delon was four, and subsequently remarried. The turmoil in his home was reflected in his schooling. An unruly student, Delon was expelled from six schools by the time he was a teenager. He eventually left school altogether at age 14 to work at his stepfather’s butcher shop before enlisting in the French Navy, where he served in the First Indochina War. Again, his rebellious nature got the better of him, and he spent 11 months of his four-year stint in a military prison for lack of discipline. Delon was dishonorably discharged in 1956 and returned to France to work a series of menial jobs. While in Marseilles, he became friendly with actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who invited Delon to join him at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. There, his striking good looks attracted the attention of numerous producers and talent scouts, among them allegedly a representative of “Gone with the Wind” (1939) producer David O. Selznick, who offered a multi-picture deal, provided that he learn English. Delon returned to Paris, where he met director Yves Allégret, who gave him his first screen role in “Quand la femme s’en mêle” (“When the Woman Butts In”) (1957) as a young hit man hired to kill the rival of a club owner (Jean Servais), a felicitous bit of casting that would echo throughout Delon’s career. Delon earned his first leading role in “Christine” (1958), as a young soldier who fell in love with an innocent (Romy Schneider) while involved in a scandalous affair with the wife of a commanding officer. Delon and Schneider became an off-screen couple as well, going on to announce their engagement in 1959.

The following year, Delon earned his star-making role as Patricia Highsmith’s murderous anti-hero, Tom Ripley, in René Clément’s “Purple Noon” (1960). His cool performance as an amoral young man who murdered and assumed his friend’s identity to advance his social standing won favor from critics as well as Highsmith herself, and soon established Delon as a major European star. A richer, more sensitive turn as a young Italian in love with a prostitute (Annie Giradot) in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” (1961) followed, as did his stage debut that same year opposite Schneider in a production of “Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” directed by Visconti. Delon was soon the leading man of choice for many of Europe’s most acclaimed directors, including Michaelangelo Antonioni for “Eclipse” (1962), Julien Duvivier for “The Devil and the Ten Commandments” (1963), and Henri Verneuil, who cast him as a reckless criminal opposite French screen legend Jean Gabin in “Any Number Can Win” (1963). Delon also garnered a reputation as a rogue off-screen as well when Schneider called off their engagement in 1963 upon discovering that he had fathered a son, Christian, with the German singer-actress Nico. The following year, he married actress Nathalie Barthélemy, with whom he had a son, actor Anthony Delon. I

 

A 1963 Golden Globe nomination for his turn as the headstrong nephew of Italian prince Burt Lancaster in Visconti’s celebrated “The Leopard” increased Delon’s international visibility, leading to offers from Hollywood. Save for the gritty neo-noir “Once a Thief” (1965), with Delon as a reformed criminal dogged by the law (Van Heflin) and the mob (Jack Palance), his Hollywood efforts were largely glossy, empty affairs like the all-star “Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1965) and the truly dreadful Western comedy “Texas Across the River” (1966) with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop. He returned to France the following year to appear in his iconic role as an icy, meticulous hit man in Jean-Pierre Melville’s New Wave cult favorite “Le Samourai” (“The Samurai”) (1967). His carefully controlled performance as a moody loner who lived and died by a strict code of personal conduct would come to dominate his screen persona, and Delon would play variations on the role in subsequent films like “Le Motocyclette” (“Girl on a Motorcycle”) (1968), which increased his standing among both French and international audiences. His marriage to Barthélemy ended during this period, due to his affair with actress Mireille Darc.

Delon’s ascent to fame was severely threatened by a 1969 scandal involving the murder of his former bodyguard, Stefan Markovic. Investigations into the killing unearthed links between the actor and numerous members of the European underworld, as well as scandalous connections to political figures like the wife of French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. Delon was repeatedly held for questioning in regard to the case, but was eventually acquitted. However, many industry figures believed that his association with Markovic would ruin his career. To the surprise of many, Delon became even more popular with French moviegoers, who felt that his connections to criminal elements lent a note of veritas to his numerous gangster roles. He quickly capitalized on the notoriety by starring in a string of popular crime films, including “The Sicilian Clan” (1969) and Jacques Deray’s “Borsolino” (1970), which teamed him with enduring French movie idol Jean-Paul Belmondo. Delon also produced many of these films through his company, Delbeau Productions, and even enjoyed a continental pop hit with a 1973 duet with Dalida of the ballad “Paroles, paroles.”

Delon again attempted to break into the American market with Michael Winner’s political thriller “Scorpio” (1973), which reunited him with Burt Lancaster. But he was soon back in France, where he ruled the box office through crime pictures like “Two Men in Town” (1973) with Gabin, and “Flic Story” (1975), based on French police detective Roger Borniche’s nine-year pursuit of escaped killer Emile Buisson (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He stepped briefly away from police procedurals to play the masked hero “Zorro” (1975), a choice made largely to please his young son. The following year, he received a Cesar nomination for Best Actor as “Monsieur Klein” (1976), a French art dealer who is mistaken by the Nazis for a wanted Jewish fugitive. A second Cesar acting nod came the following year for the police drama “Mort d’un pourri” (“Death of a Corrupt Man”) (1977). This again led him back to the United States to play an airline captain in “Concorde Airport ’79,” but its abysmal failure nixed any further ventures to Hollywood.

In 1981, Delon made his directorial debut with “Pour la peau d’un flic” (1981), a modest crime picture that he fashioned as a tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville. He would direct two additional, entirely minor thrillers before balancing his time between producing and occasional acting appearances. By the 1980s, his famously aquiline features had grown craggy, and he was no longer the actor of choice for romantic leading men, though his personal appeal remained untouched, as evidenced by his 1987 romance with the much-younger model Rosalie van Breemen. Delon gave a critically acclaimed turn as a haughty but miserable royal in Volker Schlondorff’s “Swann in Love” (1982) and finally earned a Cesar for “Notre Histoire” (“Our History”) (1984), starring as a dissolute middle-aged man who became fixated on a disinterested prostitute and single mother (Nathalie Baye). These triumphs were compounded by the blockbuster hit “Parole de flic” (1985), an action-packed crime picture that featured the 50-year-old Delon performing his own stunts.

But advancing age, as well as the expensive failure of “The Passage” in 1986, forced Delon to consider his future projects with greater care. He directed his focus toward a popular line of products that bore his name – from perfume and cigarettes to sunglasses – that became the epitome of cinematic cool after Chow Yun-fat wore a pair in John Woo’s epic crime drama “A Better Tomorrow” (1986). There were still film projects, most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) (1990) with Delon as a hitchhiker taken in by Domiziana Giordano’s mystery woman. The thriller “L’ours en peluche” (“Teddy Bear”) (1994), with Delon stalked by an anonymous caller, was a return to form, but he announced his retirement from acting after Patrice LeCompte’s “Un chance sur deux” (1998), an action film that reunited him with Belmondo, fizzled at the box office.

He did return sporadically over the next decade, most notably as a vain Julius Caesar in the smash European hit “Asterix at the Olympic Games” (2008). Between 1991 and 1995, he also reaped numerous honors for his lifetime of film work, including an Honorary Golden Bear in 1991 from the 45th Berlin International Film Festival, as well knighthood from the Legion of Honor that same year. In 1995, he was made an Officer of the National Order of Merit, while in 2005, his knighthood was promoted to the next highest class, that of Officer.

Alain Delon died aged 88 in August 2024.

By Paul GaitaThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Guardian obituary in augest 2024

The actor Alain Delon, with his finely chiselled features and glacial gaze, was known as the “ice cold angel”. As a young man, his handsome, impassive face was a blank page on which apparently any emotion could be written. This served to cover the passion or perversity beneath, a trait used effectively by such directors as Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Joseph Losey, Jean-Pierre Melville and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Delon’s best work was done in the 1960s and 70s, the first two decades of a career spanning half a century. After this exciting initial period, he settled down, with occasional exceptions, to consolidating his tough-guy persona, becoming one of the most popular male stars in French cinema.

 

In the light of his unpromising background, Delon, who has died aged 88, deserved the success he achieved. Born in Sceaux, a large suburb in the south of Paris, he was the son of Edith (nee Arnold) and Fabien Delon. They divorced when Alain was four, and he was brought up by foster parents until they died in a car accident. He then moved back to live with his mother and her new husband, Paul Boulogne, a butcher, to whom Delon was unhappily apprenticed when he was 14

This was soon after he completed his sporadic education, having been expelled from several schools for bad behaviour. At 17, he joined the French navy, serving in Indochina as a parachutist during the siege of Dien Bien Phu.

 

Out of his four years in the military, Delon spent 11 months in prison for being “undisciplined”. In 1956, after being dishonourably discharged, he returned to civilian life, working as a porter, a waiter and a salesman. During this time he became friends with the actors Brigitte Auber and Jean-Claude Brialy, and went with them to the 1957 Cannes film festival.

There, his looks attracted attention, especially from a talent scout for the producer David O Selznick, who offered him a Hollywood contract, provided that he learned English. But after Auber persuaded the director Yves Allégret to cast the young would-be actor in Quand la Femme s’en Mêle (When a Woman Meddles, 1957), Delon decided to start acting in France.

Surrounded by such veterans as Edwige Feuillère, Jean Servais and Bernard Blier, Delon, looking much younger than 22, made an impression as a hitman, the sort of role he perfected in later films. Despite being touted as France’s answer to James Dean, Delon was closer to the young Alan Ladd.

In Sois Belle Et Tais-Toi (Be Beautiful But Shut Up, 1958), directed by Marc Allégret, Yves’s older brother, Delon was cast as a petty crook, partnered by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was to equal Delon in popularity in the 60s and 70s. They were later to appear together again in Borsalino (1970), Borsalino and Co (1974) and as sexagenarian action heroes in Une Chance sur Deux (Half a Chance, 1998).

Christine (1958), a love story set in Vienna at the turn of the century, gave Delon his first major role as a romantic lead, opposite Romy Schneider. During the shooting of the film – a remake of Max Ophüls’ Liebelei (1932) – the couple fell in love and became engaged soon afterwards. The romance lasted four years, and Delon and Schneider remained close until her death in 1982. They appeared together on stage in 1961 in a Parisian production of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, directed by Visconti, as well as in the films La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969) and Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972).

It was in 1960 that Delon became an international star with his portrayal of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley in René Clément’s Plein Soleil (Purple Noon). With his pretty-boy looks, Delon perfectly reflected the calculated charm, indolence and coldness of the ambiguous character, who schemes to take his friend’s clothes, yacht, girlfriend and life

In contrast, in the same year, Visconti cast him as a “wise fool” in Rocco and His Brothers, an epic three-hour neorealist drama. To save his poverty-stricken family, who have immigrated to Milan from southern Italy, Rocco (Delon) takes up boxing, a sport he detests. Dubbed into Italian, Delon does his best to convince as a saintly character, though it is doubtful whether any boxer could be so gentle and yet so successful.

Dubbed again into Italian, Delon was superb as an arrogant and materialistic stockbroker who has an affair with a translator (Monica Vitti) in L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), the third in Antonioni’s trilogy of alienation. Delon’s third notable Italian film was Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), in which he played the dashing and cynical young revolutionary Tancredi. As a hotheaded opportunist who represents the future of Italy, Delon’s performance is in sharp contrast to Burt Lancaster’s contemplative one as his aristocratic uncle, who represents the past.

Back in France, Delon began to take on less challenging roles, mostly in swashbucklers and thrillers. The main interest of the conventional heist movie, Mélodie en Sous-Sol (Any Number Can Win, 1963), was the coming together of the biggest French star of the 30s, Jean Gabin, and the rising star of the 60s. As interesting was his pairing with Simone Signoret, 14 years his senior, in The Widow Couderc (1971).

Delon also appeared in several English-language films at the time, including The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), in which he was an Italian photographer cum gigolo making a play for a gangster’s moll (Shirley MacLaine), and a Spanish aristocrat in the comedy-western Texas Across the River (1966). At the time, Delon could claim to be an equal in fame to any movie star in large-budget films such as Once a Thief (1965), opposite Ann-Margret and Jack Palance;Lost Command (1966), a war film with Anthony Quinn and George Segal; and Red Sun (1971) with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune, cashing in on Delon’s huge popularity in Japan.

In the artily erotic The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), directed and photographed by Jack Cardiff, Delon played Marianne Faithfull’s lover, unzipping her leather gear with his teeth and murmuring: “Your toes are like tombstones.”

In 1964 Delon married Nathalie Barthélémy, who made her screen acting debut opposite him in Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), the first of three ritualistic and atmospheric crime thrillers directed by Melville and starring Delon. In Le Samouraï, he was an expressionless hired killer; in Le Cercle Rouge (1970), he was a cool ex-con; and in Un Flic (Dirty Money, 1972), Melville’s final film, he was equally effective as a bitter cop.

Delon’s standing as a screen tough guy was enhanced when, in 1968, he and his wife, whom he was about to divorce, were implicated in a sensational political scandal. The discovery of the corpse of his bodyguard Stevan Marković in a rubbish dump – he had been shot in the head – led to revelations of drug and sex orgies involving a host of personalities from the world of politics and show business, including the wife of the president, Georges Pompidou.

Delon’s friend, the Corsican gangster François Marcantoni, was charged as an accessory to murder but was later released due to lack of evidence. Both Alain and Nathalie were held for questioning, but were not accused. What had alerted police was a letter Marković sent to his brother in which he wrote: “If I get killed, it’s 100% the fault of Alain Delon and his godfather François Marcantoni.”

In the same year, Delon began a 15-year relationship with the actor Mireille Darc, with whom he co-starred in Jeff (1969), the first film made by his own company, Adel, and a few other pictures.

During the same period, under Malle’s direction, he portrayed William Wilson, an Austrian officer and gambler, who murders his doppelganger, in one of three segments based on Edgar Allan Poe stories in Spirits of the Dead (1968).

Another of his outstanding performances was the title role of Losey’s Mr Klein (1976), as a French-Catholic art dealer who is mistaken for a Jew of the same name during the occupation in 1942. Unable to convince the Gestapo of the mistaken identity, he is deported.

Many years later, Delon claimed to be a supporter of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. “He is dangerous for the political set because he’s the only one who’s sincere,” Delon declared. “He says out loud what many people think, and what the politicians refrain from saying because they are either too demagogic or too chicken. Le Pen, with all his faults and qualities, is probably the only one who thinks about the interests of France before his own.”

In the 80s, Delon, already a producer of a dozen movies, tried his hand at directing. His two films, Pour la Peau d’un Flic (For a Cop’s Hide, 1981) and Le Battant (The Fighter, 1983), were pale imitations of Melville. But, in 1984, Delon was given two of his last chances to display his acting talents. In Bertrand Blier’s Notre Histoire (Our Story), he was a morose alcoholic, and, in one of the most surprising casting decisions, he played the decadent gay dandy Baron de Charlus in Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love, based on the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel.

Following his dual role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990), and a number of poorly received films, Delon announced his decision to retire from acting in 1997, although he did star in a television cop series, Frank Riva (2003-04), and made an unexpected appearance as Julius Caesar in Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008). A final TV role came in the drama Une Journée Ordinaire (2011), and he appeared as himself in S Novym Godom, Mamy! (2012), the story of a Russian New Year’s Eve, and Disclaimer (2019), as a talkshow guest.

An honorary Palme d’Or in 2019 provoked complaints against Delon’s history of misogynistic comments and support for the far right. The Cannes festival responded that its concern lay with achievement in cinema: “We’re not going to give (him) the Nobel peace prize.” Also that year came the video release of the song, Paroles, Paroles, that had given the singer Dalida and him a hit in 1973.

Delon, who became a Swiss citizen after many years’ residence in Geneva, with a second home in Douchy, south of Paris, spent most of his later years as president of a company that produced a variety of products such as perfume, wristwatches, clothing and sunglasses, all with the label AD.

The Velvet Underground singer Nico said that Delon was the father of her son Ari, though he denied it – the boy was adopted by Delon’s mother and stepfather, and took their surname, Boulogne; he died in 2023. Delon is survived by his son, Anthony, from his first marriage, and his children, Anouchka and Alain-Fabien, from his second marriage, to Rosalie van Breemen, which ended in divorce in 2002.

 Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon, actor and producer, born 8 November 1935; died 18 August 2024

 This obituary has been updated since Ronald Bergan’s death in 2020

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Ulla Jacobsson

Ulla Jacobsson was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1929.   She started her film career working for the great Ingmar Bergman in such films as “Smiles of a Summer Night”.   She came on the international scene in the early 60’s and appeared opposite Glenn Ford in “Love is a Ball”, with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in “Zulu” and Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris in “The Heroes of Telemark”.   She came to the U.S. in the early 60’s to guest star in an episode of the classic series “Naked City”.   She died in Vienna at the age of 53.

Her obituary in “The New York Times”:

Ulla Jacobsson, a Swedish-born film and stage actress, died of bone cancer Aug. 22 in a hospital in Vienna. She was 53 years old. Mrs. Jacobsson began her career in her native Gothenberg and appeared in classical and modern theater roles before turning to film.

She won international acclaim in the Swedish film ”One Summer of Happiness,” which took the top prize at the Cannes film festival in 1951. She was featured in Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish classic, ”Smiles of a Summer Night.”

”Ulla Jacobsson as the farm girl is a sensitive and expressive young thing who stunningly portrays the capricesand the terrors of an innocent maid in love,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times of her performance in ”One Summer of Happiness.” Among her other films were ”All the Joy of Earth,” ”Eternal Love” and ”Zulu.”

Ms. Jacobsson, who was married to an Austrian scientist, lived in Vienna.

From blog:   European Film Stars:

 Ulla Jacobsson was born in Mölndal, a part of the Göteborg (Gothenburg) urban area on the west-coast of Sweden in 1929. After her stage debut in Göteborg’s Stadsteater in 1947, she appeared in plays by Kaj Munk,Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and William Shakespeare. She made her first film appearance in Bärande hav/The seas we travel (1951, Arne Mattsson) with Alf Kjellin. Her second film with the same director, Hon dansade en sommar/One Summer of Happiness (1951, Arne Mattsson), was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Based on the novel by Per Olof Ekstrom, the story revolves around the romance between 19 year old student Goran (Folke Sundquist) and the 17 year old farmer’s daughter Kerstin (Ulla Jacobsson). A scene where Goran and Kerstin swim and embrace in the nude caused a sensation and made Jacobsson world-famous. In Cannes the film won a prize for the music and at the Berlin Film Festival the film was awarded with the Golden Bear. Next Jacobsson appeared in such Swedish productions as All jordens fröjd/All the World’s Delights (1953, Rolf Husberg), the August Strindberg adaptation Karin Månsdotter (1954, Alf Sjöberg), and Herr Arnes penningar/Sir Arne’s Treasure (1954, Gustaf Molander). In Germany she also appeared in films, includingDie Heilige Lüge/Pious Lies (1954, Wolfgang Liebeneiner) with Karlheinz Böhm, and Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld/The Priest from Kirchfeld (1955, Hans Deppe) with Claus Holm. Another international hit was the comedy of mannersSommarnattens leende/Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman). Bergman’s comic masterpiece opens with middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) again failing to consummate his marriage with the much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). At IMDb, reviewer Clavallie writes: “Charming, light-hearted, delicate, and romantic are not the terms most people think to use when describing Bergman films, and yet Smiles of a Summer Night is all of these. This is one of the most sophisticated romantic movies ever filmed, and a pure delight. It is a clever and witty romance based on the classic elements of French farce. Simply wonderful.” The film’s success started Jacobsson’s international career. In France she starred in Crime et châtiment/Crime and punishment (1956, Georges Lampin), an updated version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s story about the Nietzchean student Raskolnikov (Bernard Blier). In Germany she appeared with O.E. Hasse and Maximilian Schell in Die Letzten werden die Ersten sein/The Last Ones Shall Be First (1957, Rolf Hansen). That year she moved to Vienna, where she was offered an engagement at the Theater in der Josefstadt.

In the early 1960’s, Ulla Jacobsson started appearing in English language films. She made one American film, the light romantic comedy Love Is a Ball (1963, David Swift) starring Charles Boyer. At AllMovie, Hal Ericksonwrites: “the graceful and talented Jacobsson had to withstand an idiotic ad campaign which tried to redefine her as a Swedish ‘sex symbol’.” Normally she tended to play serious and anxious looking characters. In Great Britain she became better known for her part of the daughter of a missionary (played by Jack Hawkins) in Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield). Filmed on a grand scale, Zulu is a rousing recreation of the 1879 siege of Rorke’s Drift in Natal, Africa. An army of 4,000 Zulu warriors had already decimated a huge British garrison; and now threatened the much smaller Rorke’s Drift with less than 100 British soldiers. After this film, Jacobsson started hopscotching between Europe and England for the balance of her career. Other notable films include the war film The Heroes of Telemark (1965, Anthony Mann) with Kirk Douglas, and La Servante/The Servant (1970, Jacques-Paul Bertrand) with France Anglade. She won the Deutschen Filmpreis (German Film Award) for Supporting Actress in Alle Jahre wieder/Next Year, Same Time (1967, Ulrich Schamoni) with Sabine Sinjen. She reunited with her first director, Arne Matsson for Bamse/My Father’s Mistress (1970, Arne Mattsson). Her last films were Wolfgang Petersen’s thriller Einer Von Uns Beiden/One or the Other (1975, Wolfgang Petersen) with Elke Sommer, andFassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit/Fox and His Friends (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). The latter was the interesting and heartbreaking story of Fox, a gay sideshow worker (played by Fassbinder himself) who wins the lottery, only to be exploited to the hilt by his upper-class lover (Peter Chatel). Jacobsson played Chatel’s mother. Later she only made a few more TV-films, including the miniseries Das Ding/The Thing (1978, Uli Edel). The reason for her retirement was that she had fallen ill. In 1982 she died from bone cancer in a hospital in her hometown Vienna. She was 53. Ulla Jacobsson was married three times. Her first marriage was to the Viennese engineer Josef Kornfeld, with whom she had a daughter, Ditte. Then she was married to Dutch painter Frank Lodeizen, with whom she had a son, Martin. Lodeizen’s daughter Rifka Lodeizen from a later marriage is now a well known film actress in the Netherlands. Jacobsson finally married Austrian ethnologist Hans Winfried Rohsmann.

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ABOUT ME

Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.

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