European Actors Archives - Page 29 of 29

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901. She began her career in German silent film and then won international acclaim as Lola-Lola in “The Blue Angel” with Emil Jannings. The popularity of the film led to offers from Hollywood and Dietrich went to the U.S. in 1930. She had a contract with Paramount Studios and her first Hollywood film was “Morocco” opposite Gary Cooper. Her most famous movies include “Shangai Express” with Anna May Wong, “The Garden of Allah” with Charles Boyer and “Knights Without Armour” with Robert Donat. In later life she had a very successful career as a concert performer. She had a late career movie success with “Witness for the Prosecution” with Tyrone Power. On retirement she went to live in Paris and became reclusive in her later years. Marlene Dietrich died in 1992 at the age of 90. Her website can be accessed here.

Daily Telegraph obituary in 1992.

Celebrated for her roles in The Blue Angel and Destry Rides Again, she appeared in 50 films between 1923 and 1964. She was the last well-known survivor of the Kaiser’s Germany.

Her theme tunes – Falling in Love Again, Johnny, The Boys in the Back Room and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – haunted generations; her rendering of Lilli Marlene became as popular as that of Lile Andersen which was the favourite of British and German troops in the Second World War.

Husky-voiced and fair-haired, with heavily-lidded eyes, she displayed a cool ‘don’t care’ expression of world-weary disillusion. In an age when stardom is transitory, she proved enduring.

Marlene Dietrich was a postmistress at dispensing her own dangerous blend of glamour and carried through life the aura of Berlin’s smoky decadence.

Blonde, Teutonic, with high-chiselled cheekbones, she mesmerised her audiences by innuendo, letting her vacant eyes drift over the room, pulling in her heavily magenta-ed lower lip, displaying all the artifice of languor.

Famed for playing prostitutes in films, her world was never one of convention. She yearned for all that was artificial.

As a singer she was a polished performer, alternatively lazy in mood and powerfully aggressive, almost paramilitary. Her delivery of Johnny was both breathy and erotic and she manipulated the microphone in a manner nothing less than sexual.

No one who saw her spectacular entrance down the winding staircase of London’s Café de Paris in the 1950s is ever likely to forget it. Sparkling from head to foot with no shortage of white mink, she did not so much descend as glide down like a serpent, disdainful, glamorous, a little threatening.

Far from modest, Dietrich relished a record of the applause at these performances. One evening she played this to Noël Coward, explaining: ‘This is where I turn to the right . . . Now I turn to the left.’ When the first side ended, she threatened to turn the record over. Coward erupted: ‘Marlene, cease at once this mental masturbation]’ Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin on Dec 27, 1901, the younger daughter of a Prussian officer, Louis Dietrich, and his wife, Josephine Felsing, who came from a family of jewellers. She spent part of her childhood in Weimar.

Her father died in 1911 and her mother, who then married Eduard von Losch, a Grenadier colonel, played a big part in her life. She was brought up in the Germanic tradition of duty and discipline. The theatre was in her blood from the start; she worshipped Rilke, read Lagerlof and Hofmannsthal and knew Erich Kästner by heart.

She was keenly musical and learned the violin. From 1906 to 1918, she attended the Auguste Viktoria School for Girls in Berlin. At the end of the First World War, she was enrolled in the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik but stayed only for a few months.

The family soon fled to the country, where her stepfather died. In 1919, she entered the Weimar Konservatorium to study the violin. She hoped to become a professional violinist but a damaged wrist destroyed this hope.

In 1920, Marlene was back in Berlin. The next year she auditioned for the Max Reinhardt Drama School and played the widow in The Taming of the Shrew.

A string of minor parts followed. Marlene lived in virtual penury, worked in a glove factory and acted and danced. It was a depressing way of life.

In 1923, she played Lucie in The Tragedy of Love, on the set of which she met her husband, Rudi Sieber. It was by no means love at first sight but Marlene began by being in great awe of him. They married and had a daughter, Maria (born in 1925).

The marriage did not last. Sieber was overshadowed by Dietrich, who described him as a ‘very, very sensitive person’. She bought him a farm in California where he dwelt with his animals, a mistress (until she went mad), her blessing and her financial support; he died in 1976.

In the late 1920s, Dietrich acted and filmed in various productions in Berlin, including I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.

In 1930, she was discovered by the Viennese director, Josef von Sternberg, who detected in her the raw sexuality of a seductive vamp and brought her to fame in his film The Blue Angel. Von Sternberg transformed her from a rather brawny girl with the slight air of a female impersonator into a creature of glamour.

Even in The Blue Angel, as she sits on the barstool as the seductive temptress Lola-Lola, luring the salivating professor to his doom, her legs appear more well covered than is now considered fashionable. Von Sternberg recognised the conflict within her: ‘Her personality was one of extreme sophistication and of an almost childish simplicity,’ he wrote.

Originally Dietrich had been rejected for the part as ‘not at all bad from the rear but do we not also need a face?’ But then von Sternberg saw her by chance in the Georg Kaiser play ZweiKrawatten. She was gazing bored at the action on stage and he was drawn to her disdain and poise.

Despite her success, UFA did nor renew her contract and so she signed with Paramount and emigrated to Hollywood. There she made several memorable films for von Sternberg.

Morocco, in which she played a cabaret star in love with a French legionnaire (Gary Cooper), included a scene in which Dietrich, dressed as a man, plants an unchaste kiss on a girl’s mouth in a café. The film brought massive fame and Marlene contrasted the adulation she received off camera to the virtual martyrdom she endured under von Sternberg’s precise and relentless direction.

Dishonoured followed, in which she played an Austrian spy, who fixed her make-up in the reflection of an officer’s sabre and applied her lipstick while a German officer ranted at her. The firing squad then shot her dead.

She was described as a ‘vamp with brains and humour’ and was paid pounds 50,000.

Von Sternberg was harshly criticised in his later films for presenting Dietrich in a series of lavish films in which she was little more than a clothes-horse, bedecked in black lace, feathers and jewels – Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman.

These criticisms von Sternberg repudiated. Dietrich displayed a mixture of self-love and outward tenderness, her egoism and Germanic ruthlessness belied by a sweetly feminine mouth and high, serene forehead. In 1933, at von Sternberg’s suggestion, she played Lily Czepanek in Song of Songs for Reuben Mamoulian. Von Sternberg ended his association in 1935 (following which his career floundered).

He concluded: ‘When we first met, her pay was lower than that of a bricklayer and, had she remained where she was, she might have had to endure the fate of a Germany under Hitler.’ Whatever the pains of the association, it had been a rewarding one.

Dietrich’s association with von Sternberg was the subject of an analytic study, In the Realm of Pleasure, concerning von Sternberg, Dietrich and the ‘masochistic aesthetic’.

The author, Gaylyn Studlar, concluded: ‘Dietrich is frequently mentioned as an actress whose screen presence raises questions about women’s representation in Hollywood cinema. She has also acquired her own cult following of male and female, straight and gay admirers.

‘The diverse nature of this group suggests that many possible paths of pleasure can be charted across Dietrich as a signifying star image and across von Sternberg’s films as star vehicles.’

Kenneth Tynan also pursued this theme in a celebrated profile of the star: ‘She has sex but no particular gender. Her ways are mannish: the characters she played loved power and wore slacks and they never had headaches or hysterics. They were also quite undomesticated. Dietrich’s masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.’

Inevitably, the arrival of Dietrich was seen in Hollywood as that of a blonde Venus in the vanguard of Garbo, the Sphinx. There was some similarity in the style of the films (Mata Hari then Dishonoured, Queen Christina in comparison to The Scarlet Empress).

It was generally accepted that if any rivalry existed, Garbo won without effort. A remarkable composite photograph by Steichen exists portraying Dietrich and Garbo together but, if they ever met, it was an unsatisfactory encounter.

At the behest of Mercedes de Acosta, with whom both were romantically linked, they made the wearing of slacks by females fashionable. In 1936, Dietrich starred opposite Cary Grant in Desire and then played in The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour and Angel. In 1939, came her energetic portrayal of Frenchy, the Wild West saloon keeper in Destry Rides Again.

This classic included Dietrich’s spirited wrestling with James Stewart, and she gave tongue to the evocative song The Boys in the Back Room, while bestriding the bar.

In the early years of the Second World War, there were more films for more directors. Meanwhile, in Germany Hitler destroyed all but one copy of The Blue Angel and went to great lengths to try to lure Dietrich to his cause.

But in 1943 she assumed the honorary rank of Colonel in the American Army and made radio broadcasts and personal appearances on behalf of the American war effort. In 1944, she joined the United States Overseas Tour and paid extensive visits to the Allied troops in Europe.

Dressed in an elegant version of military uniform, her blonde hair as flowing and feminine as ever, her mission was to boost morale, to entertain and to encourage Allied victory. There is film footage of Dietrich greeting the Fifth Army with a jaunty ‘Hello, Boys]’ and congratulating them on their singing.

Jean-Pierre Aumont was a fellow actor she met in wartime Italy and who was destined to become a lifelong friend. He summed up her role: ‘In the eyes of the Germans, she is a renegade who serves against them on behalf of the American Army. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her.

‘Under the veneer of her legendary image, Marlene Dietrich is a strong and courageous woman. There are no tears. No panic. In deciding to go sing on the field of battle, she knew the risks she was taking and assumed them courageously, without bragging and without regrets.’

Dietrich’s line was that her former countrymen had fallen under the tyranny of Hitler and that this evil must be removed. Jean Cocteau was sad that in the early post-war years she never sang Falling in Love Again in the original German in fear of being associated with the Germany of 1940.

Of her war-work, she said: ‘This is the only important work I’ve ever done.’

The elder sister Dietrich never mentioned (Elisabeth) was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and her mother died in 1945. Marlene returned to America after the cessation of fire. She was awarded the Legion of Honour and the American Medal of Freedom.

Dietrich made many further films, including Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, and Witness for the Prosecution for Wilder. In this she played two roles, one a Cockney, her unlikely accent coaxed by a despairing Noël Coward.

She also appeared in Touch of Evil for Orson Welles and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg opposite Spencer Tracy. In 1956, she contributed a memorable cameo to Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days, perched on a stool Destry-style.

Dietrich also ran her own radio spy series, Café Istanbul, on America’s ABC Network. But it was as a singer that her later career blossomed.

By now in her early 50s, she began by compèring a Madison Square benefit arranged by her daughter. Out of a wish not to sit on an elephant, she took the role of ringmaster in top hat, tailcoat and tights. This white tie look was to be a lasting trademark.

Dietrich made her debut at the Sahara, Las Vegas, in 1953 and the next year took London by storm at the Café de Paris. She was always glamorously dressed and accompanied by an orchestra of 22 men.

Thereafter she made long tours all over the world, invariably accompanied by Burt Bacharach. Though she relied heavily on Bacharach, whom she described as her ‘arranger, accompanist and conductor’, she was always her own agent.

In 1960, Dietrich made a controversial return to Germany where she was greeted by a bomb on one side and Willy Brandt on the other. She toured Israel the same year and visited Russia in 1964.

In 1967, she made her debut on Broadway. Dietrich’s one-woman show carried on until the late 1970s when accidents recurred with startling frequency.

She broke so many bones that comedians used to mimic her, singing ‘Falling off stage again . . .’ Finally, she broke her thigh in Sydney in 1976 and gave up.

As Dietrich grew older, she seemed to defy the passing years. Cecil Beaton watched her 1973 Drury Lane performance on the television and dissected her ruthlessly: ‘Somehow she has evolved an agelessness.

‘The camera picked up aged hands, a lined neck and the surgeon had not be able to cut away some little folds that formed at the corners of her mouth.

He had, however, sewn up her mouth to be so tight that her days of laughing are over . . .’

Beaton admired her dress, her ‘huge, canary yellow wig’ and her showmanship: ‘She has become a mechanical doll, a life-size mannequin. The doll can show surprise, it can walk, it can swish into place the train of its white fur coat. The audience applauds each movement, each gesture, the doll smiles incredulously – can it really be for me that you applaud? ‘Again a very simple gesture – maybe the hands flap – and again the applause, and not just from old people who remembered her tawdry films but the young find her sexy.

She is louche and not averse to giving a slight wink, yet somehow avoids vulgarity.

‘Marlene is certainly a great star, not without talent, but with a genius for believing in her self-fabricated beauty, for knowing that she is the most alluring fantastic idol, an out-of-this-world goddess or mythological animal, a sacred unicorn.’

Beaton attributed her success entirely to perseverance and an ability to magnetise audiences into believing she was a phenomenon, just as she has mesmerised herself into believing in her own beauty. An experienced critic of such creatures, Beaton could find no chink in her armour.

Despite himself, he sat enraptured. He almost concluded that she was ‘a virtuoso in the art of legerdemain’ but then he wrote: ‘ ‘You know me,’ Marlene is fond of saying. Nobody does because she’s a real phoney. She’s a liar, an egomaniac, a bore.’

It was to the music of Falling in Love Again that Dietrich bade the world a spirited farewell in Paris: ‘Je dois vous dire adieu, parce que c’est fini.’

Sparkling in sequins and surrounded by flowers, she glided off stage, bowing low, clenching and unclenching her hands as though casting a spell over the audience, returning for more applause and, finally, clinging to the curtain.

At length, she disappeared behind it by degrees with a parting wave to the besotted audience.

Her last film appearance was in 1978 as the glamorously veiled Baroness von Semering in Just a Gigolo with David Bowie, in which she intoned the title song. She was still high cheekboned but the power had gone from her voice.

The myth of Marlene lived on and the rumours of her loves – with Jean Gabin, Ernest Hemingway and others – were long discussed. She moved between her apartment in the Avenue Montaigne and a flat at 993 Park Avenue. In her ABC book, she declared: ‘A man at the sink, a woman’s apron tied around his waist, is the most miserable sight on earth.’

As for pouting, she wrote: ‘I hate it but men fall for it, so go on and pout.’

Dietrich was not only a star. She was a nurse to many friends, a cook to her grandchildren and, in reality, there was much about her that was hausfrau-ish. Kenneth Tynan described her as ‘a small eater, sticking to steaks and greenery but a great devourer of applause’.

She was the author of an unforthcoming book of memoirs, in which she finally rejected the world: ‘What remains is solitude.’

In the years of her retirement, there were rumours that Dietrich was drinking or in a home. Ginette Spanier, the directrice of Balmain, suggested that she dine in a neighbouring restaurant and that they have a tame photographer on hand to record her evening out to show that all was well.

Spanier worried that Dietrich might not be equal to the challenge but, on the night in question, the Teuton emerged from her building as glamorous as ever. When the photographer approached, she pushed Spanier firmly out of the picture to ensure she was portrayed alone.

Every time the world thought they had heard the last of her, she was either photographed at an airport or issued a curious statement to the press.

Then, in 1984, she agreed to make a documentary film with Maximillian Schell (her co-star in Judgment at Nuremberg), without appearing on camera, her voice overriding the visual images in a mixture of German and English, ‘three days this and three days that,’ as she put it.

In that film, she was dismissive of many of her old films, judging them ‘kitsch’; she rejected women’s lib as ‘penis envy’; maintained that women’s brains weighed only half a man’s and declared: ‘Well, I’m patient and I’m disciplined and I’m good.’

In extreme old age, she remained in her Paris apartment and many friends from the past were bitter when their telephone calls were answered by Dietrich pretending to be the maid.

Jean-Pierre Aumont was a favoured friend, who submitted to many hours of telephone conversation, and occasionally took her out to tea at the Plaza Athenee opposite her apartment.

She rose at six, could sometimes be seen early in the morning, draped in Indian shawls, walking a tiny dog, accompanied by a minder. But officially she was never seen and, after Garbo’s death, became the world’s most celebrated recluse, existing on a diet of champagne, autographs, reading and the telephone.

Yet the lingering image must forever be her descent of the Café de Paris staircase, the club specially adorned with cloth of gold on the walls and purple marmosets swinging on the chandeliers and Noël Coward intoning his gracious, if clipped, introduction: Though we might all enjoy Seeing Helen of Troy As a gay cabaret entertainer, I doubt that she could Be one quarter as good As our lovely, legendary Marlene

Jacques Sernas was born in Lithuania in 1925. He has had an international career with many French films to his credit. He was educated in Frances and during the Second World War was a Resistance Fighter. He was captured and imprisioned for a year in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. His first film was “Miroir” in 1947. His most famous film is “Helen of Troy” which was released in 1956. He had a supporting part in “La Dolca Vita” in 1960.

With eye-catching good looks, blond Lithuanian-born actor Jacques Sernas (A.K.A. Jack Sernas) is best known for cutting a fine figure in European spectacles in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in 1925 he was raised and schooled in Paris before joining as a French Resistance fighter during W.W.II. Captivated by German forces and imprisoned for over a year in Buchenwald, he was eventually freed and began studying medicine in his early postwar years. Acting soon caught his fancy, however, and he made his unbilled debut in the French film Miroir (1947). He would dominant both French and Italian pictures in the ensuing years with such action films as The Red Falcon (1949), in the title role, and in such costumed romancers as Anita Garibaldi (1952). He hit major international attention after being cast as Paris opposite sex sirens Rosanna Podesta and Brigitte Bardot in Helen of Troy (1956). Hollywood took brief notice but nothing much came of it. He was relegated for the most part to supporting characters, making one lasting impression as a fading matinee idol in Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960).

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

Jacques Sernas died in 2015 in Rome.

Alexander Godunov was born in Sakhalin, Russia in 1949. He joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1971 and soon became it’s premier dancer. He also began acting in Russian films and played Count Vronsky in “Anna Karenina” in 1974. Whilst touring with the Bolshoi in New York in 1979, he defected and was granted political asylum. He joined the American Ballet and danced with them until 1982. In the mid 80’s he turned to acting. He wa seen with Harrison Ford in “Witness” where he played an Amish farmer. In “Die Hard” with Bruce Willis, Godunov played a violent German terrorist. His last film was “The Zone” in 1995. He died the same year at the age of 45.

“Independent” obituary:

Alexander Godunov was a dancer of handsome stature and blond good looks. He possessed a virtuoso technique and enjoyed a career of glamorous highlights in ballet and film; but his triumphs were short-lived.

From Igor Moiseyev’s Young Dancers Company, to Bolshoi Ballet, to American Ballet Theatre, to Hollywood, he brought a glossy trail of spectacular appearances that glowed brightly in the limelight of the moment.

Born in Riga in 1949, Godunov first studied ballet in his native city where he was a classmate of Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1964 the Wonder-Boy Baryshnikov joined the Vaganova Choreographic Academy in Leningrad. A year later Godunov endeavoured to follow him but could not obtain a permit. Much dismayed, he resorted to Moscow and continued his studies at the Bolshoi Choreographic School where he was fortunate enough to be taught by that consummate artist Sergei Koren.

After graduating in 1967 he spent three years with Moiseyev’s Young Dancers Company before returning to the Bolshoi fold as a soloist. He made his debut as the youth in Chopiniana and appeared in a number of classical roles in such ballets as Swan Lake, Giselle, The Nutcracker and Don Quixote.

His fame soared when Maya Plisetskaya gave him the role of Karenin in her ballet Anna Karenina (1972). He succeeded Nicolai Fadeyechev as her regular partner and danced a flamboyant Jose to her Carmen in the Alberto Alonso production of that name. He brought a panache to everything he did. He won a gold medal in the Moscow International Ballet Competition in 1973. His future with the Bolshoi seemed assured.

He married Ludmilla Vlasova, a dancer renowned for spectacular lifts. She was considerably older than him. He was a man who needed mothering. In August 1979, during the Bolshoi season in New York, Godunov decided to defect. There were dramatic scenes, with his wife sitting for three days on a plane at Kennedy airport while Soviet officials debated her freedom of choice to stay with her husband or to separate. In the end she elected to return to the Soviet Union.

It was a curious stroke of fate that Godunov’s path should cross again with that of his old class-mate Baryshnikov; or was Baryshnikov, who had become the idol of American ballet, the crucial spur for his defection? At any rate, Godunov defected in order to join American Ballet Theatre of which Baryshnikov was the star and was due to be appointed its artistic director the following year.

Godunov’s career with ABT was loaded with publicity: he was the golden boy, the talk of the town. His every appearance in the repertoire was hailed by press and public with eulogies amounting almost to hysteria, but after three years he was told there were no new roles for him. He did some guest appearances in South America under the banner Godunov and Friends and danced Swan Lake with Eva Evdokimova at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin.

During this time he built up a very close friendship with the film star Jacqueline Bisset, with whom he went to live in Los Angeles. She introduced him to movie agents and a new career in film and television opened up for him.

Godunov loved the United States and took a great interest in politics. He settled permanently in Hollywood and spent much time at the studio of Tatiana Riabouchinska, widow of David Lichine, who had been a star of de Basil’s Ballet Russe in the 1930s. Recently he had found time to visit his mother in Riga and only a month ago was filming in Budapest.

Playing in turn a kindly farmer, a tempestuous orchestral conductor and a vicious terrorist, Alexander Godunov displayed a remarkable range of characterisation in his first three film roles, and it can only have been his apparently tenuous grasp and pronunciation of the English language that impeded his movie career, writes Tom Vallance.

His debut, in Peter Weir’s Witness (1985), was particularly well received. In this popular thriller he plays an Amish farmer in love with a young widow (Kelly McGillis) whose son has witnessed a murder in New York City. Godunov makes clear (with a minimum of dialogue) the farmer’s unease as he senses a rival in the tough cop (Harrison Ford) who joins the non-violent community to trap the killers; and he retains audience sympathy with an engaging portrait of rustic equanimity.

In Richard Benjamin’s hyperactive comedy The Money Pit (1986), Godunov prudently underplayed his role as a tempestuous conductor, self-described as “shallow and self-centred”, lending droll understatement to expressions of his temperament (“The union forces me to allow you to go to lunch,” he tells his orchestra, “in spite of the way you played”) and conceit – when his ex-wife splits with her new boyfriend he comments, “He’s lost a wonderful woman and I know what it’s like – I’ve lost many.” Some of his lines, though, were less easily discerned behind his thick accent.

John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988) was one of the best thrillers of the decade, and as the most sinister of the arch- villain Alan Rickman’s team of lethal terrorists, Godunov uses his blond athleticism to menacing effect as he stalks the hero (Bruce Willis) through the high-rise building that has been commandeered by the killers. Their encounter culminated in a particularly ferocious hand-to- hand struggle, with Godunov ultimately the vanquished.

It is surprising that after this telling role in a cinematic blockbuster, Godunov made only two further screen appearances and in horror films that had only limited release: Willard Carroll’s The Runestone (1992), in which an archaeologist is turned into a monster by a piece of rock, and Waxwork 2: Lost in Time.

Boris Alexander Godunov, dancer, actor: born Riga 28 November 1949; married 1971 Ludmilla Vlasova (marriage dissolved 1982); died Los Angeles c18 May 1995.

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

Brigitte Auber was born in 1928 in Paris. She has an impressive list of credits on film and television in her native country. She has only one major international film to her credit, “Th Catch A Thief” with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. She had a major role in this movie and it is puzzling that she did not make more British or U.S. films.

Auber began her film career with the leading role in Jacques Becker‘s Rendezvous in July (1949) and was known for roles in numerous French films of the 1950s, including Julien Duvivier‘s Romance Under the Sky of Paris (1951). Auber’s best-known role, and one of her few English-speaking parts, was opposite Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch a Thief, released in 1955. Auber plays the role of Danielle Foussard. Nearly a decade and a half later, she played the part of elder Françoise in Claude de Givrays miniseries Mauregard (1969) while the young Françoise has been played by another French Hitchcock-actress, Claude Jade from Topaz. She also had a supporting role in film adaptation of The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later(1988) from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Leonardo DiCaprio played Louis XIV of France and the Man in the Iron Mask, while Auber played the Queen mother’s attendant.

Lilian Montevecchi appeared in some of the popular films in the 1950’s. Among her films are “Moonfleet”, “Me and the Colonel” and “King Creole”. In te 1980’s and 90’s she had a spectacular run on Broadway in a series of musicals. She was born in Paris in 1931 and began her career as a ballet dancer.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Paris-born entertainer Liliane Montevecchi first put on ballet shoes at the age of 9. Nine years later, she became prima ballerina in Roland Petit’s ballet company. Hollywood took a sudden interest in her in the early 1950s along with other foreign-born ballet dancers such as Leslie Caron, Zizi Jeanmaire, and Moira Shearer. Liliane was signed to a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and began appearing in their musicals. However, for the most part, the roles were small and only mildly flavorful, and did nothing to not enough to distinguish her roles which did nothing to abet her film career. Such cinematic ventures as The Glass Slipper (1955) (starring Caron), Daddy Long Legs (1955) (also starring Caron), Moonfleet (1955), Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), The Sad Sack (1957), Me and the Colonel (1958), and the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (1958) came and went without much fanfare for Liliane personally.

It was the live stage that would raise her to legendary status. First, she starred with the Folies Bergere for nine years, traveling all over the world. She then conquered Broadway in the 1980s, winning both Tony and Drama Desk awards for her flashy role in the musical “Nine”, based on Fellini’s art-house film 8½ (1963). She earned a Tony Award nomination several years later with an equally flashy role in the musical “Grand Hotel”. The entertainer, beloved for her delightful mangling of the English language, has appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and has vamped and camped with the best of them in her acclaimed cabaret shows and niteries from here to Timbuktu. These include the semi-autobiographical shows “On the Boulevard” and “Back On the Boulvards.” Still going strong at age 70+, Lilliane Montelecchi has shown time and time again that she is a one-of-a-kind diva who knows no limit.

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

Interview on “Stylelikeu”, please click here.

2016 Concert Review in “The New York Times” in 2016:

If any entertainer could be described as “Paris incarnate,” it might be Liliane Montevecchi, a quintessential French gamine from another age whose autobiographical one-woman show, “Be My Valentine,” opened on Thursday night at Feinstein’s/54 Below.

Ms. Montevecchi, 83, was a model of proud self-containment in her opening-night performance. Every gesture, from her fingertips to her toes to her bright, metallic smile was a carefully choreographed display of phenomenal agility and disciplined movement. You could spend an entire night studying her hands, which she opened and closed as though wielding fans.

Ms. Montevecchi, who was a star of the Folies Bergère for nine years and before that a prima ballerina with Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris, can bow all the way to the floor and kick almost to the ceiling. Beyond her specific talents as a dancer and singer, she is an imperial presence.

She spoke of her Hollywood career — she appeared in “The Young Lions”opposite Marlon Brando, the only film star she name-checked, but didn’t like the movies, she said. Most of the other luminaries to whom she paid tribute were music-hall legends like Josephine Baker, Édith Piaf and Mistinguett, whose signature song, “Mon Homme,” (popularized in America by Fanny Brice as “My Man”) she performed in French.

Ms. Montevecchi’s American show business career reached a peak with her performance in the Tommy Tune musical “Nine” (1982) — for which she won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical — and continued with “Grand Hotel,” which had a Gallic-flavored score by Maury Yeston. Accompanied on piano by Ian Herman, she sang one song from each of those shows.

The musical part of the program was a disappointingly predictable rundown of European cabaret songs, including the Mistinguett favorite “Je Cherche un Millionnaire,” later popularized by Eartha Kitt; “Ne Me Quitte Pas”; and the inevitable “La Vie en Rose.” American songs included “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “But Beautiful” and a Cole Porter suite. Acting out Stephen Sondheim’s “I Never Do Anything Twice,” she overemphasized the song’s running double entendre. But her vocals lacked the stamina and confidence of her dancing.

All she really had to do to take command was simply to move.

The above “New York Times” review can also be accessed online here.

New York Times obituary in 2018:

Liliane Montevecchi, the French-born actress, singer and dancer who won a Tony Award for her showstopping role as the producer in “Nine,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her friend Marc Rosen, who confirmed the death, said the cause was colon cancer.

Ms. Montevecchi was 50 and a runaway from American film and television when she was cast in “Nine,” the 1982 Broadway musical drama about a film director’s midlife crisis, based on the Federico Fellini film “8½.”

The role of the movie producer had been written for a man, but the character was reworked so that Ms. Montevecchi, who didn’t fit anywhere else in the show, could be cast. In “Folies Bergère,” her big number, she reveled in the joys of the good old days of show business, stopped to chat flirtatiously with audience members and ended up gloriously wrapped in a 30-foot-long black feather boa.

Frank Rich’s review in The New York Times described her as “a knockout — a glorious amalgam of music-hall feistiness and balletic grace, with Toulouse-Lautrec shadows about the eyes.” She received the Tony for best featured actress in a musical, beating two of her own “Nine” co-stars, Karen Akers and Anita Morris.

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“Nine” was neither Ms. Montevecchi’s first Broadway show — although the earlier ones had been revues (“La Plume de Ma Tante” in 1958, “Folies Bergère” in 1964) — nor her last. She earned another Tony nomination, for a 1989 musical adaptation of “Grand Hotel,” in which she was Grushinskaya, the high-strung ballerina, nostalgic for her glory days, played by Greta Garbo in the 1932 film.

Later, when she worked in cabaret, Stephen Holden of The Times called her “an imperial presence.”

Liliane Dina Montevecchi was born on Oct. 13, 1932, in Paris, the only child of Franco Montevecchi, an Italian-born painter, and Janine Trinquet Montevecchi, a French-born hat designer. The couple soon divorced.

Liliane began taking ballet lessons when she was 9 or so and appearing onstage soon afterward. At 18, she was in Roland Petit’s company Les Ballets de Paris, where she became a prima ballerina. After she made her film debut in a small role in “Femmes de Paris” (1953), Hollywood called. She did two 1955 films, “The Glass Slipper” and “Daddy Long Legs,” both starring her countrywoman Leslie Caron and featuring Mr. Petit’s choreography.

MGM signed her to a seven-year contract, but American movies largely wasted her. Over the next three years, she appeared in an odd assortment of small roles in seven films, including the war drama “The Young Lions” (1958), with Marlon Brando, in which she played a French escort with strong views about Nazis; the Jerry Lewis comedy “The Sad Sack” (1957), as a saucy, skimpily clad club performer in Morocco; and the Elvis Presley musical drama “King Creole” (1958), as a saucy, skimpily clad club performer in New Orleans.

After a few television roles in series like “77 Sunset Strip” and “Playhouse 90,” she returned to dancing, her first love, joining the Folies-Bergère in Las Vegas in 1964. She worked with that troupe and the Paris company for nine years.

Basking in her new Broadway acclaim, she began her cabaret career in 1982. John S. Wilson of The Times called her first engagement, at Les Mouches in New York, a “brilliant, breathlessly fast-moving act.”

In her solo shows, she sang in both English and French, exuding confidence and style and nailed the double-entendres for decades. She also appeared in an acclaimed 1998 all-star revival of “Follies” at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey; it seemed to be Broadway bound but never transferred.

Ms. Montevecchi, who was said never to have married, is survived by her longtime companion, Claudio Borin, who lives in Italy. “I’m set in my ways, and I’ve lived all my life alone,” she said in a 1982 television-news interview. “I don’t trust people a lot.”

She sometimes told friends about an impulsive wedding in Las Vegas and a marriage that lasted two weeks, but she never revealed the man’s name or provided evidence, they said.

She eventually returned to motion pictures, this time as a character actress. Her last film was “4 Days in France” (2016), as a rural Frenchwoman who gives advice to a lovelorn young gay man. (“Don’t run after people.”) Before that, she appeared in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003) as a diamond magnate’s wife who flirts shamelessly with an advertising executive played by Matthew McConaughey.

Ms. Montevecchi never retired from cabaret performances, appearing at Feinstein’s 54/Below for the last time in 2016. “She didn’t know it was her last engagement,” Steven Minichiello, a close friend, recalled. “She expected to heal and go on forever. She was the master class in stage presence.”

In 2016, Ms. Montevecchi told the Woman Around Town website: “After all these years, it’s not O.K. to just do a show. Because you know more, you want to give more.”

Jacques Bergerac (Wikipedia)

Jacques Bergerac was born in 1927 and was a French actor who later became a business executive with Revlon.

Jacques Bergerac was born in 1927 in Biarritz, France. He was recruited by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios while a law student in Paris at the age of 25.

Bergerac met and married Ginger Rogers with whom he appeared in Twist of Fate(1954) (also known as Beautiful Stranger). He then appeared as Armand Duval in a television production of Camille for Kraft Television Theatre, opposite Signe Hasso. He played the Comte de Provence in Jean Delannoy‘s film, Marie Antoinette Queen of France.

In Strange Intruder (1956), he shared the screen with Edmund Purdom and Ida Lupinoand in Les Girls (1957), he played the second male lead. He also appeared in Gigi(1958), Thunder in the Sun (1959), the cult horror film The Hypnotic Eye (1960) and A Global Affair (1964). In 1957, he received the Golden Globe Award for Foreign Newcomer.

He appeared in a few more films and on television including Batman, 77 Sunset Strip, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (3 episodes), The Lucy Show, Get Smart, The Dick Van Dyke Show and Perry Mason (Season 7, Episode 19).

His last appearance was on an episode of The Doris Day Show in 1969, after which he left show business and became the head of Revlon‘s Paris office and of the Perfumes Balmain company. His younger brother Michel became CEO of Revlon six years later.

He also managed the rugby club Biarritz Olympique from 1980 until 1981.

Bergerac married screen star Ginger Rogers in February 1953, and they divorced in July 1957. In June 1959, he married actress Dorothy Malone in Hong Kong, where she was on location for her 1960 film The Last Voyage. They had daughters Mimi and Diane together, and divorced in December 1964.

He died June 15, 2014, at his home in Anglet, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France.

Jacques Bergerac is an actor whose brief career in Hollywood ran from 1954 to 1969, before he left the industry to become the head of Revlon’s Paris division. He led a truly cosmopolitan existence as an actor, though, beginning with his first film role: a supporting part in the British mystery “Twist of Fate.” The film’s star, Ginger Rogers–the legendary actress who was Fred Astaire’s frequent dance partner/love interest–made Bergerac her fourth husband. In 1957, Bergerac appeared in “Les Girls,” George Cukor’s musical comedy, starring Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor, also wining the Golden Globe for Foreign Newcomer Award that same year. In 1958, Bergerac starred in the French adventure movie “Un homme se penche sur son passé” and then appeared with fellow French natives Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier in Vincente Minelli’s musical romantic comedy “Gigi,” which dominated the 1959 Academy Awards, including Best Picture honors. In 1962, Bergerac co-starred with Gordon Mitchell in the Italian action drama “Fury of Achilles,” and in 1965, he returned to Italy to make the comedy “Hard Time for Princes,” co-starring with Joan Collins. On television, Bergerac was reduced to strictly character actor status, with initial appearances on several theater programs and then various comedies and dramas, making his longest run–relatively, at just six episodes–on the crime drama “77 Sunset Strip,” in 1969

Marie-France Pisier obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.

Marie-France Pisier

Marie-France Pisier was born in Vietnam in 1944 and died in 2011. At the age of twelve she came to live in Paris. Her breakthrough role came in 1968 in Francois Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses”. In 1973 she had a critical and popular success with “Celine and Julie Go Boating”. “Cousin, Cousine” in 1975 was another very popular international success. She attempted a Hollywood career with “The Other Side of Midnight” and the television series “Scruples” amongst others . Her U.S. career was not particularly successful and she returned to work in France. She died in 2011.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel’s first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France.

Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut’s enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L’Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine’s stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine’s heart.

Léaud and Pisier were born in the same month and were both 18 when they appeared in the film. Pisier was discovered by a casting director, who had been instructed by Truffaut that: “Jean-Pierre Léaud’s partner must be a real young girl, not a Lolita, not a biker type, nor a little woman. She must be fresh and cheerful. Not too sexy.”

Colette, who treats Antoine like a “buddy”, much to his frustration, runs into him again briefly in Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) and, finally, in the last film of the series, L’Amour en Fuite (Love On the Run, 1979), which she co-wrote. By then Colette was a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, but far more emotionally mature. The film contained what Truffaut called “real flashbacks”, when we see the differences between Pisier in her screen debut and Pisier 17 years and more than 20 films later, when she was midway through a prestigious career. She worked with such auteurs as Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz, appearing in quality French mainstream movies, with a short and unhappy detour to Hollywood.

Pisier was born in French Indochina, now Vietnam, where her father served as colonial governor. She moved to Paris with her family when she was 12. While starting out in films, she completed degrees in jurisprudence and political science at Paris University.

After she had appeared in several mediocre genre films, including thrillers directed by the actor Robert Hossein, Pisier’s career took a more interesting turn. In 1974, she appeared in the most outrageous and amusing sequence in Buñuel’s penultimate film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté (The Phantom of Liberty), where she is among the elegant guests seated on individual lavatories around a table from which they excuse themselves to go and eat in a little room behind a locked door. In the same year, in Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), Rivette’s brilliantly allusive comic meditation on the nature of fiction, she and Bulle Ogier act out, in a stylised and exquisite manner, a creaky melodrama in a mysterious housePisier was cast by the director André Téchiné in several of his early films, including Barocco (1976), for which she won a César award for her supporting role as a prostitute with a baby in tow. She later played Charlotte Brontë, alongside Isabelle Adjani (as Emily) and Isabelle Huppert (as Anne) in Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979).

Her performance as a frivolous, neurotic wife in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin Cousine (1975), a hit in the US, led to her starring role in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), a Hollywood soap opera in which she almost overcame the cliches as a naive French girl who, betrayed by an American pilot, begins to use men for their money and power.

But subsequently, apart from French Postcards (1979), in which, according to the critic Roger Ebert, “Marie-France Pisier, her jet-black hair framing her startling red lipstick, is the kind of dark Gallic woman-of-a-certain-age who knocks your socks off”, she was little seen in English-language movies. Among the rare exceptions was Chanel Solitaire (1981), in which she portrayed the designer Coco Chanel with her usual elegance. She made a splendid Madame Verdurin in Ruiz’s Proust adaptation, Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and was ethereal in the same director’s magical Combat d’Amour en Songe (2000).

More recently, she was an iconic presence in Christophe Honoré’s homage to the French new wave, Dans Paris (2006). Pisier also directed two films, Le Bal du Gouverneur (The Governor’s Party, 1990), starring Kristin Scott Thomas and adapted from Pisier’s own novel about some of her childhood spent in New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Comme un Avion (Like an Airplane, 2002), a family drama based on the death of her own parents.

Pisier was an outspoken defender of women’s rights and legal abortion. She overcame breast cancer in the 1990s. Her first husband was the lawyer Georges Kiejman, with whom she had a son. She is survived by her second husband, Thierry Funck-Brentano, a businessman; her brother, Gilles; and her sister, Evelyne.

• Marie-France Pisier, actor, writer, director, born 10 May 1944; died 24 April 2011

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

Louis Jourdan obituary in “The Independent”.

Good looks can be a mixed blessing for an actor. In the case of Louis Jourdan, the romantic star who died on Saint Valentine’s Day aged 93, they guaranteed him a career both in his native France and in Hollywood, but rarely in roles that moved him out of an audience’s comfort zone. A handsome devil to say the least, he was the absolute epitome of the suave, debonair, seductive Frenchman. The camera adored him, a creature of immaculate appearance and masculine finesse.

It was his role as the bon vivant enchanted by Leslie Caron’s flibbertigibbet debutante in Gigi (1958) that made him an international star. The film won nine Oscars and made Jourdan, who sang the title number, Hollywood’s favourite Frenchman. He was cast by producer Arthur Freed when Dirk Bogarde proved unavailable, Freed having delighted in Jourdan’s performance in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) as the louche Prince Dino, a notorious womaniser whose girlfriends become known as “Venice girls” after he takes them to Venice for romantic trysts.

Born in Marseille in 1921 as Louis Robert Gendre, the son of hotelier Henry Gendre, he rubbed shoulders with the glitterati from an early age when his father ran a seaside hotel in Cannes and assisted in the running of an early incarnation of the city’s film festival. He was encouraged by the visiting stars, and although his father’s career moved the family to Turkey and England, the latter destination provided an excellent opportunity to master the English language. Back in France, he studied acting under René Simon at the École Dramatique, and upon graduating, took his mother’s maiden name of Jourdan.

He was spotted on stage in Paris by the screenwriter and director Marc Allégret, a prodigious talent-spotter who could also claim to have discovered Gérard Philipe, Roger Vadim and Michèle Morgan. Allégret gave him work as an assistant camera operator on a drama within a drama school, Entrée des Artistes (The Curtain Rises), in 1938, as preparation for his movie debut the following year in another story of actors finding the line between work and play blurring, Le Corsaire (The Pirate). Adapted from a play by Marcel Achard, the film offered Jourdan the chance to act opposite Charles Boyer, a French star in Hollywood who Jourdan would go on to emulate. It was a hotly anticipated project, but shooting was halted after a month as France mobilised for war, and the film was never completed.

He did get to act opposite another major star, albeit a fading one, Ramon Novarro, in his eventual film debut, La Comédie du Bonheur (The Comedy of Happiness) in 1940, before war put his career on hold.

During the war, his father was a prisoner of the Gestapo, while Jourdan and his brother were active members of the Resistance, printing and distributing leaflets. He refused to appear in films propagandising Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government, a stand which made him rightly cherished when the French film industry rebuilt itself in the post-war years.

He left for Hollywood in 1946 at the invitation of David O Selznick, and made a good first impression as a man of mystery in the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947), a costly affair directed by Hitchcock and starring Gregory Peck. No aspiring movie star could have wished for better company to ride into town with, although the film turned out to be a disappointment. His much better second Hollywood film got him his name above the title and allowed him to add depth to another smouldering lothario: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), co-starring Joan Fontaine, is an affecting study of unrequited love that remains a powerful watch today. It was the work of another European in Hollywood, director Max Ophüls, which perhaps explains the skillful dodging of tuppeny novelette melodrama for delicate emotional exploration.

Louis Jourdan in ‘Gigi’ (Getty)He began to sense the perils of typecasting when appearing as the lover of adulterous Jennifer Jones in Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949), and in an attempt to break free of such roles, returned to France briefly, where he continued to play lovers, but of a slightly different style: the philandering was strictly for fun in Rue de l’Estrapade (1953) for instance, and his features lent themselves well to villainous roles when he played Doris Day’s psychotic husband in Julie (1956). However, he was by his own admission, “a star without a hit” until he surrendered to Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and then Gigi (1958), which overwhelmed his attempts to break free of light romantic leads.

His Gigi co-star, Leslie Caron, remembered that he was “one of the handsomest men in Hollywood, but not comfortable with his image”, a predicament he shared with the aforementioned Dirk Bogarde. He regularly claimed he was “Hollywood’s French cliché”, in parts that involved “mostly cooing in a woman’s ear”, Gigi in particular making him world famous as “a colourless leading man”.

He remained a bankable star in Hollywood following the success of Gigi: he followed it up with another musical, Can-Can (1960), co-starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine, but his most interesting work was generally to be found elsewhere. His Broadway debut, in the lead role for the Billy Rose stage adaptation of André Gide’s novel The Immoralist, at the Royale Theatre in 1954, was a bold undertaking: he not only played a gay man, but worked in between a brittle James Dean and his then lover, the intense Geraldine Page. The performance won him a Donaldson Award for Best Actor.

He made his American television debut starring in the detective series Paris Precinct for ABC in 1955, but it was a medium he fared better with in Britain, where he was occasionally cast much more imaginatively – on one occasion as the persecuting husband in Gaslight, opposite Margaret Leighton, for ITV in 1960, and for Lew Grade in 1975, playing De Villefort to Richard Chamberlain’s Count of Monte Cristo.

One of the most interesting moments in his career came when Philip Saville cast him as the lead in Count Dracula (1977), a weighty BBC dramatisation that remains one of the most faithful imaginings of the source material, coming just after Hammer Films had given up the ghost. Jourdan’s casting surprised the critics, but, speaking to the Radio Times in 1977, Saville explained that he saw Dracula as “a romantic, sexually dashing anti-hero in the tradition of those figures usually dreamed up by women… Rochester, Heathcliff… figures that can overpower a strong heroine, inhuman figures that can’t be civilised.” Ahead of the game in finding romanticism in vampirism, the drama occasionally lacks bite – but Jourdan remains one of the most interesting and original Draculas in screen history.

He was the best thing in Octopussy (1983), an otherwise lousy Bond film which even lacked a memorable theme song, and bowed out with a similarly suave villain in Peter Yates’s Year of the Comet in 1992, the year he retired. Sadly, few of the roles in his final years are much to speak of.

Although his career was plentiful, it was hamstrung by poor timing and monotonous casting. Nevertheless, he was always a pleasure to watch, a naturally appealing performer. Despite his lothario image, he remained married to his childhood sweetheart, Berthe (known by the nickname Quique) for 67 years, until her death last year. They had one son, who fell victim to drug addiction and died in 1981.

Whenever he spoke in interviews of his enduring marriage, his seductive but sincere voice and passionate conviction could, in Ophelia’s words, move the stoniest breast alive, and reminded one that he was a star of the kind that they just don’t make anymore.

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

Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..

TCM Overview:

European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973

Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.

When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).

In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.

Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.

In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.

These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.

So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.

“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”

In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.

On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.

Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.

Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.

By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”

In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).

Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.

Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).

In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.

Jackie died in 2015.
Ronald Bergan

John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).

One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.

Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.

She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.

Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.

• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019

• John Francis Lane died in 2018