Jean-Pierre Leaud was born in 1944 in Paris. He first came to fame as a boy actor in 1959 in “The 400 Blows” in 1959 which was directed by Francois Truffaut. He became associated with the films of Truffaut including “Bed and Board” in 1970 and “Two English Girls” and especially in 1973, “Day For Night”. He also made many films with Jean-Luc Goddard.
TCM overview:
n his first major film role as Antoine Doinel, Jean-Pierre Leaud exhibited a mature command as an unloved youth who turns petty thief in Francois Truffaut’s memorable classic “The Four Hundred Blows” (1959). The film’s final frozen image of Leaud’s round face staring at the camera with a mixture of humor and confusion has become a familiar screen image. Truffaut went on to direct the actor in six additional films, four of which detailed the further adventures of Doinel. Leaud matured into a lanky, sharp-featured but furtive man. Over the course of the series, he proved to be a modest talent with his initial performance the best. As Leaud matured along with the character of Doinel, he demonstrated his limitations, playing against the sentimentality of “Stolen Kisses” (1968) and lending an almost cold presence to “Bed and Board” (1970, easily the weakest of the entries in the series). The final installment, “Love on the Run” (1979), was a modest effort. Despite having allied himself with Truffaut (Leaud also gave adequate performances in 1971’s “Two English Girls” and 1973’s “Day For Night”), the actor also forged working relationships with several of the key figures of the New Wave, most notably Jean-Luc Godard. “Masculin-Feminin” (1966) offered Leaud a role not dissimilar for Doinel, a hopeless romantic searching for true love. He received some notice as the callow central figure in a love triangle in “La Maman et la putain/The Mother and the Whore” (1973). But after Truffaut’s untimely death, Leaud seemingly lost interest while continuing to work. Reportedly dealing with personal problems, he became a much more haunted screen presence, often cast as filmmakers (e.g., Godard’s “The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company” 1986; Olivier Assayas’ “Irma Vep” 1996) or neurotics (i.e., the father in “Paris at Dawn” 1991). The eternal question posed at the end of “The Four Hundred Blows” seems as appropriate in the 90s as it did in 1959: what was to become of this person? It is one only time could answer.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Linda ChristianEdmund Purdom & Linda ChristianCover of the magazine Epoca. Actress Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Henrietta Stella Welter Vorhauer) in Venice. Venice, Italy. 1955 (Photo by Mario De Biasi\Mondadori Portfolio\Mondadori via Getty Images)Linda ChristianLinda Christian
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” 2011 obituary:
The phrase “famous for being famous” could have been invented for Linda Christian, who has died aged 87. Her celebrity came from her marriages to the handsome film stars Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom, and her liaisons with various wealthy playboys and bullfighters, rather than her somewhat limited acting ability.
Christian’s extravagant, cosmopolitan lifestyle derived from her stunning beauty – she was dubbed “The Anatomic Bomb” by Life magazine – and her ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and English. She was born Blanca Rosa Welter in Tampico, Mexico, the daughter of a Dutch executive at Shell, and his Mexican-born wife of Spanish, German and French descent. As the family moved around a great deal, living in South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, she gained a taste for globetrotting.
Christian’s early ambition was to become a doctor, but after winning a beauty contest and meeting Errol Flynn in Acapulco, she was persuaded to try her luck in films in the US. She was soon cast as a Goldwyn Girl in the actor Danny Kaye’s first feature film, Up in Arms (1944), and as a cigarette girl in Club Havana (1945), directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Then, with her name changed to Linda Christian, she signed a contract with MGM, which gave her a small decorative role in the musical Holiday in Mexico (1946), shot in Hollywood, and an exotic one in Green Dolphin Street (1947), as Lana Turner’s Maori maid.
At the time, Turner was having an affair with Power. Rumour has it that Christian overheard Turner say when Power was going to be in Rome. Christian decided to fly to Rome, stay at the same hotel and wangle a meeting with the dashing star. A romance led to Christian and Power getting married in January 1949 at a church in Rome while an estimated 8,000 screaming fans lined the street outside.
Prior to the marriage, the only substantial role MGM had given Christian was as an island girl rescued by Tarzan from the clutches of an evil high priest in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948), the 12th and final time Johnny Weissmuller played the Ape Man. Christian, wearing a skimpy two-piece costume, is referred to as a mermaid because she swims a lot.
After marrying Power, Christian started to get a few leading roles in B-pictures such as Slaves of Babylon (1953), co-starring Richard Conte. More gratifying was her sitting for a portrait by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The painting, reproduced on the cover of her autobiography, Linda (1962), and for which she was once offered $2m, is now in a private collection.
In 1954, Christian played Valerie Mathis, James Bond‘s former lover now working for the French secret service, in a CBS television version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, therefore allowing her to lay claim to being the first Bond girl. At this time, the movie fan magazines were full of photos of Power and Christian as a blissfully married couple with two daughters, while the gossip columns intimated that both husband and wife had strayed. In 1954, Christian played Purdom’s snooty fiancee in the MGM musical Athena. Christian had been at the same school as Purdom’s wife, the former ballerina Anita Phillips, and the Powers and the Purdoms became good friends, even going on holidays together. But soon sexual jealousy broke up the once cosy foursome. In 1956, Christian divorced Power, charging mental cruelty.
After the divorce, there was no shortage of millionaires to help keep Christian in the manner to which she was accustomed. Once she was called to testify at a Los Angeles court because she refused to return jewels given to her by the socialite Robert H Schlesinger, whose cheque for $100,000, as partial payment for the jewels, had bounced. Christian was also involved with the racing driver Alfonso de Portago, with whom she was photographed a short while before he died in a crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia car race, in which several spectators were also killed. That year, she and the Brazilian mining millionaire Francisco “Baby” Pignatari went on an around-the-world tour together. In 1962 she married Purdom. They divorced the following year.
Christian continued to appear in routine films such as The Devil’s Hand (1962), as a seductive high priestess of voodoo, opposite her real-life sister Ariadna Welter. In Francesco Rosi’s semi-documentary The Moment of Truth (1965), she played herself as an American in Barcelona who attracts a matador (the bullfighter Miguel Mateo Miguelín). During the filming, she fell for the bullfighter Luis Dominguín, the former lover of Ava Gardner.
In 1968, Christian retired to Rome. She returned to cinema almost 20 years later, at the age of 64, in a couple of dreadful Italian thrillers.
She is survived by her daughters, Taryn and Romina Power.
• Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Welter), actor, born 13 November 1923; died 22 July 2011
For her brave, unsentimental performance as an elderly woman agonisingly declining physically and mentally in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), Emmanuelle Riva, who has died aged 89, became the oldest best actress Oscar nominee ever, at 85. It was more than half a century since Riva’s soothing cadenced voice and delicate features had dominated Alain Resnais’ masterful Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).
In that film, the voice of Riva as Elle is first heard over horrific newsreel images of the victims of the atom bomb, and it is almost 10 minutes into the film before we see her in the arms of her Japanese lover (Eiji Okada), called simply Lui. She is a French actor in Hiroshima, he is an architect. The repeated phrases of their dialogue echo throughout the film written by Marguerite Duras. He says: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
She replies: “I saw everything. I imagined nothing.” He retorts: “You imagined everything.” Riva’s performance is both symbol and reality. She both represents France and a woman trying to come to terms with the tragedy of the Japanese man’s city while recalling her love for a German soldier in Nevers during the war.Advertisement
Interviewed in 1959 after the film’s premiere, Riva said with some foresight, “The film has probably spoiled me because I think I’m now going to be disappointed in anything that follows.” Thus, whatever she did subsequently, until Amour came along, she would always be measured by her role in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Yet few actors could claim to have worked with such a range of radical directors: Resnais, Haneke, Georges Franju, Marco Bellocchio, Philippe Garrel, Gillo Pontecorvo, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-Pierre Melville, Fernando Arrabal and Krzysztof Kieslowśki.
Born Paulette Riva in Cheniménil, Alsace-Lorraine, to René Riva, an Italian-born sign writer, and his wife, Jeanne (nee Nourdin), she began working, like her mother, as a seamstress for a dressmaker. However, she decided to realise her ambitions to become an actor after appearing with an amateur company, despite her father’s opposition.
She arrived in Paris in 1953 hoping to study at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique. At 26, however, she was considered too old to apply for a grant. But she was able to attend the celebrated Centre d’Art Dramatique at 21 rue Blanche, under Jean Meyer. (More than 20 years later, Riva played Natalya Petrovna to Meyer’s Doctor Shpigelsky in a TV production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.)
She got her first break in the theatre in Paris as Raina in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, which was followed by her Vivie in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, and further parts in Luigi Pirandello’s Naked and Gorky’s Children of the Sun. When Resnais cast her in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Riva claimed, at 32, that it was the first part she had been given as “a real woman and not a young girl”. It counts as her first screen role, though she had previously had a small uncredited part as a secretary in The Possessors (Les Grandes Familles,1958), starring Jean Gabin.
After Hiroshima Mon Amour, she was much in demand and made about two films a year during the 1960s. Often called “intellectual”, she contributed to this image by refusing star status and being very selective in her artistic choices. Although introverted as a performer, she often played a tragic woman of passion.
She shone in Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960) as a woman in a concentration camp who kills herself by running into an electrified fence. In Léon Morin, Priest (Léon Morin, Prêtre, 1961), she is the atheist widow who falls in love with the Catholic priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in rural France during the occupation. Melville’s quietly polemical film explores their ideology through a series of discussions, beautifully modulated in a restrained manner by Riva and Belmondo.
In Franju’s Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962), an updated version of François Mauriac’s 1927 novel of the same name, Riva plays a woman who, stifled by provincial life and a dull marriage, decides to poison her boring but inoffensive husband (Philippe Noiret). Her subtle portrayal of the psychological and physical deterioration of Thérèse won her the Volpi cup for best actress at the Venice film festival.
Also for Franju, she appeared as an aristocratic widow who helps the wounded during the second world war in Thomas the Impostor (Thomas l’Imposteur, 1964), from the Jean Cocteau’s 1923 novel. She was also effective as the wife of a teacher (Jacques Brel), accused of the rape of three pupils in André Cayatte’s Risky Business (Les Risques du Metier, 1967). One of her most bizarre enterprises was Arrabal’s I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse (J’Irai Comme un Cheval Fou, 1972) in which Riva, seen in surreal flashbacks, played a domineering mother murdered by her son.
Gradually, Riva began to accept supporting roles in films and on television, and returned occasionally to the theatre. Among her more interesting films were Mocky’s Is There a Frenchman in the House? (Y a-t-il un Français dans la Salle?,1982), Bellocchio’s The Eyes, the Mouth (Gli Occhi, la Bocca, 1982) and Garrel’s Liberty at Night (Liberté, La Nuit, 1983), in which she played an abandoned wife moving towards politics during the Algerian war.
In Kieslowśki’s Three Colours: Blue (Trois Couleurs: Bleu, 1993), there is a memorable homage sequence when the grief-stricken Juliette Binoche, whose mother Riva plays, scrapes her knuckles against a stone wall she passes, as Riva does in a similar scene in Hiroshima Mon Amour.
In 1997, she won great praise for her performance in Jorge Lavelli’s staging of José Sanchis Sinisterra’s Le Siège de Léningrad at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris, and in 2001, she was seen as The Chorus in a TV production of Euripides’ Médée with Isabelle Huppert in the title role.
In Amour, retaining a certain fragile beauty, she put the acting experience of a long lifetime into the character of the partially paralysed Anne, to Jean-Louis Trintignant’s devoted husband Georges, with Huppert as their daughter.
In contrast, this was followed by small film roles in light comedies such as a medium, distant and yet reassuring, in A Greek Type of Problem (Tu Honoreras Ta Mère et Ta Mère, 2013) and an eccentric aunt on the run in Lost in Paris (Paris Pieds Nus, 2016). In February 2014, Riva returned to the Paris stage, performing in Savannah Bay by Duras at the Théâtre de l’Atelier, a reunion with the avant-garde writer more than 50 years after Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Riva, who never married, once said: “I had dozens of marriage proposals, I refused them all. Why would I tie myself down with a husband and children?”
• Emmanuelle Riva (Paulette Germaine Riva), actor, born 24 February 1927; died 27 January 2017Topics
Catherine Schell was born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary. She made her film debut in 1964. In 1969 she was featured in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. In 1975 she was leading lady opposite Peter Sellers in “The Return of the Pink Panter”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Born in Budapest, Hungary, her true name is Katherina Freiin Schell von Bauschlott, the scion of a once wealthy German patrician family. Her father, the Baron Paul Schell von Bauschlott, was a well-respected diplomat until the Nazis confiscated their estates during WWII, while her mother was Countess Katharina Maria Etelka Georgina Elisabeth Teleki de Szék. Her family was living in poverty until 1948 when they sought asylum in Vienna and Salzburg as the communist regime began to take hold in Hungary. In 1950, her family emigrated to the States and Baron von Schell Bauschlott renounced his title in order for his family to gain citizenship. Catherine entered a convent school in New York’s Staten Island area. In 1957, her father joined Radio Free Europe, taking the family to Munich where she developed an interest for acting and trained at the prestigious Falconberg School. Her inauspicious debut (sometimes billed as Catherine von Schell) was in the German film Lana – Königin der Amazonen (1964). While filming Amsterdam Affair (1968), she met and married actor William Marlowe, subsequently moving to London. She went on to appear in Moon Zero Two (1969), the James Bond feature On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Callan (1974) and The Black Windmill (1974), but is best known at that time for the slapstick comedy The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), which marked Peter Sellers‘ cinematic revisiting of his “Inspector Clouseau” character. Extremely visible on TV with frequent work in such series as The Persuaders! (1971), The Adventurer (1972) and the cult sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975) starring Barbara Bain andMartin Landau playing the role of “Maya”, an alien, for which she is best known. Her marriage to actor Marlowe had run its course by 1977, and she met director Bill Hays that same year, who had two children from a previous marriage. They married in 1982, together working on a TV production of A Month in the Country (1985). Her career began to wane by the time she did the film Wish Me Luck (1995) in 1990 and she retired shortly thereafter, running a small guest hotel in France. Catherine is often mistakenly thought of as a sister of actors Maximilian Schell, Maria Schell, Immy Schell and Carl Schell, but she is not. One of her two brothers, Paul von Schell, is, however, the widower of actressHildegard Knef.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Eleanora Rossi Drago was born in 1925 in Genoa, Italy. She made her movie debut in “The Masked Pirate” in 1949. She starred in Michaelanglo Antonioni’s “Les Amiche” in 1955. Her last movie was in 1970 in “In the Folds of the Flesh”. She died in Palermo in 2007.
John Francis Lane’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
Of all those who won fame as sex goddesses of the Italian cinema in the 1950s, Eleonora Rossi Drago, who has died aged 82, was the classiest. Though she had no training as an actor and came from a humble background, she was chosen for dramatic roles by some of the most distinguished directors of the day, including Luigi Comencini, Giuseppe De Santis, Michelangelo Antonioni and Valerio Zurlini. In 1955 she won critical praise for her performance on the stage as Helena in Luchino Visconti’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, in which Marcello Mastroianni, who would later appear opposite her in many films, played Astrov.
Rossi Drago was born Palma Omiccioli, near Genoa, where her father was a sea captain. She had married unhappily in 1942 and had a daughter. She got her first job as a mannequin and then began designing couture herself. In 1947 she went to Stresa to compete in the Miss Italy beauty contest, despite risking disqualification because she had been married. She came in fourth (Gina Lollobrigida was third).
She moved to Rome, where after a few small parts using her married name Rossi, she had the luck to be cast in Persiane Chiuse (Closed Shutters, 1951), a melodrama about prostitution. The direction was taken over by Comencini, and after the film was a success, he cast her in the leading role of his next film La Tratta delle Bianche (The White Slave Trade, 1953), another melodrama.
Both films were box-office hits and launched Rossi Drago as a star. In 1952 she was given the lead role in one of the most daring films of the period Sensualità (Sensuality), directed by Clemente Fracassi. Her character was the object of a violent quarrel between two brothers played by Amedeo Nazzari, the most popular star of melodramas at the time, and Mastroianni. At the time the scandal sheets claimed there was a romance between her and Nazzari.
Her big chance came in the mid-1950s when Antonioni cast her for the main role in Le Amiche (The Girlfriends), based on a novella by Cesare Pavese. She played Clelia, a simple working-class girl who has become successful in the fashion business in Rome and returns to her home town, Turin, to open a new salon. She becomes involved in the tormented private lives of local socialites and has her own sentimental tribulations. Antonioni’s casting of Rossi Drago was inspired. She had the sophistication required for the character but also the depth that comes from a more modest social background.
At the end of that same year, 1955, Rossi Drago made her stage debut. Under the directorial guidance of Visconti, she acquitted herself admirably, alongside the experienced stage professionals of Visconti’s company playing Helena in Uncle Vanya, proving her worth to those in the film world who still treated her as only a sex goddess.
She continued to get the occasional role in “auteur” films and won plaudits for her performance in a TV adaptation of Cronin’s The Citadel, but film producers still preferred to cast her in commercial products. She was perhaps unfortunate in that, unlike Sophia Loren, she did not have a producer husband to take a personal interest in her career.
Among her good roles in the 1950s, she played in Vittorio Gassman’s film (co-directed by him with Francesco Rosi) of the Dumas-Sartre play Kean, in which he had triumphed on stage. Giuseppe De Santis, who had tested her for the role of a peasant in one of his early films, but decided she seemed too upper class, was happy to cast her in a similarly rugged role in another controversial peasant melodrama La Strada Lungo un Anno (The Year Long Road, 1958), shot under hazardous conditions in Yugoslavia and boycotted for political reasons by Italian cinemas.
She ended the 1950s with the film which perhaps most of all made those of us who wrote about films from Rome in those years think her career was heading towards new heights. This was Valerio Zurlini’s visually stunning Estate Violenta (The Violent Summer), centred on an affair between a married woman in her 30s and a younger man (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), all on holiday in that beguiling summer of 1943 when Mussolini had been arrested and many Italians were deluded into believing that fascism had been defeated. The film won her the “Silver Ribbon” award, voted for by Italian film journalists, as best actress of the year.
She appeared in unmemorable films in the 1960s, directed by Roberto Rossellini, Tinto Brass and Ettore Scola, and played Lot’s wife in John Huston’s The Bible, and felt that her career was going downhill. In 1970, after appearing with Helmut Berger in an appalling film called Dorian Gray, she decided to retire. While on a visit to Palermo she met a businessman 10 years her senior, Domenico La Cavera, a much respected citizen of the Sicilian capital with whom she began a relationship. In July 1973 they were married in the city hall by the mayor. It seems they lived a tranquil and comfortable family life in Palermo society until a recent illness kept her bedridden.
He survives her, along with his children from a former marriage and her daughter from that unhappy first marriage, Fiorella.
· Eleonora Rossi Drago (Palma Omiccioli), actor, born September 23 1925; died December 2 2007
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
She never found the international cross-over fame destined for Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, and most American audiences would not recognize her name, but voluptuous, visually stunning Eleonora Rossi Drago certainly made male hearts pulsate in Europe with her scores of princesses and temptresses throughout Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. She eventually earned respect as a fine actress and elevated her status in the films of Luigi Comencini and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. But for the most part, she gamely played the sex card in a career that stretched a bit past two decades.
She was born Palmira Omiccioli (some sources also list Palmina as her first name, near Genoa, Italy (Columbus’ birthplace) on September 23, 1925, the daughter of a sea captain. She married at the age of 17 and bore a daughter Fiorella but the marriage (to a gentleman named Rossi) did not last. She then found work as a department store mannequin and began actually designing couture clothing herself. An arresting beauty, she started competing in beauty contests and wound up in fourth place in the “Miss Italy” pageant. Gina Lollobrigida came in third. The attention lured her to films.
She moved to Rome and in 1949 began receiving small movie roles while using her married name of Rossi. Her first two big breaks came with Behind Closed Shutters (1951) [Behind Closed Shutters] with Massimo Girotti, a melodrama about prostitution, and the highly controversial Barefoot Savage (1952) [Sensuality] in which Marcello Mastroianniand Amedeo Nazzari violently quarrel over her affections. The earlier picture was directed by Luigi Comencini and considered a strong success. The highly impressed Comencini went on to cast Eleonora as a female lead in his next film La tratta delle bianche (1952) [The White Slave Trade or Girls Marked for Danger], another tawdry melodrama about prostitution that co-starred Vittorio Gassman and also showcased the up-and-comingSophia Loren.
It was obvious that Rossi-Drago had the makings of a bosomy sex goddess but she constantly strove to better her acting reputation in classier material. In 1955 she won critical notice on stage as Helena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” opposite Marcello Mastroianni as Astrov. Her finest hour in films came about that same year with the release of Antonnini’s Le amiche (1955) [The Girlfriends], in which she starred in the rags-to-riches story of a humble girl who becomes a respected owner of a fashion salon and the social class struggle therein. Among her other standout roles in the 1950s wereKean: Genius or Scoundrel (1957), again opposite Vittorio Gassman, who also directed, and the award-winning Italian/French co-production Violent Summer (1959), in which she played a married woman approaching middle age who surrenders herself to a younger man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) during the summer of ’43 and height of fascism. The film earned her the “Silver Ribbon” award, voted for by Italian film journalists, and the “best actress” award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina.
In order to work continuously, however, she was forced to take on provocative roles of lesser quality — roles that usually emphasized her physical attributes or enhanced the scenery around her. While Sophia Loren had a Carlo Ponti to promote her internationally, Rossi-Drago was less fortunate. By the 1960s she was relegated to such unmemorable adventures, horrors and sword-and-sand spectacles as David and Goliath (1960) [David and Goliath] with Orson Welles playing King Saul; The Carpet of Horror (1962) [The Carpet of Horror]; and Sword of the Conqueror (1961) [Sword of the Conqueror] opposite a raping and pillaging Jack Palance. Elsewhere, she was pretty much overlooked in the epic ensemble as Lot’s wife in John Huston‘s mammoth failure The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966).
Things did not improve into the decade and after appearing with Helmut Berger in the critically-panned retelling of Dorian Gray (1970) and Pier Angeli in the pedestrian Sergio Bergonzelli giallo In the Folds of the Flesh (1970) [In the Folds of the Flesh], she decided to call it quits. Blending back inconspicuously into mainstream society, she married Sicilian businessman Domenico La Cavera in 1973, and eventually retired to Palermo, Italy. She died at age 82 of a brain hemorrhage on December 2, 2007, and was survived by her second husband and daughter.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Catherine Spaak was born in France in 1945. She made her movie debut in “Le Trou” in 1960.Her breakthrough role was in “The Empty Canvas” in 1963 with Bette Davis and Horst Buchholz. In 1967 she went to Hollywood to make “Hotel” with Rod Taylor. In 2011 she featured as Rufus Sewell’s mother in the TV series “Zen”.
New York Times obituary in 2022:
Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died on April 17 in Rome. She was 77.
Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death.
Born outside Paris, Ms. Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in “Sweet Deceptions,” from 1960 (originally “Dolci Inganni”).
Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in “La Ronde,” a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Ms. Fonda (who went on to marry Mr. Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls’ 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play, was released and dubbed in the United States as “Circle of Love.”
Ms. Spaak became an onscreen sex symbol as a young actress, winning the attention of many international magazines, including Playboy. With her long, straight hair and blunt-cut bangs, she also became something of a style-setter in the 1960s.
Her first film role in the United States came in “Hotel” (1967), an adaptation of the Arthur Hailey novel, starring Mr. Taylor. She played the mistress of an investor (Kevin McCarthy) who wants to buy a landmark New Orleans hotel. Variety called her performance “charming and sexy.”
In 1968 she had top billing, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant, in “The Libertine” (originally “La Matriarca”) playing “a restless young widow” who “skips in and out of various sexual encounters,” as Howard Thompson wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times.
She had another leading role in 1971, in Dario Argento’s murder mystery thriller “The Cat O’Nine Tails,” performing alongside Karl Malden and the television star James Franciscus. In 1975 she took on a different genre playing a prostitute in “Take a Hard Ride,” an Italian-American “spaghetti western” that also starred Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.
Ms. Spaak pursued a parallel singing career in the 1960s and ’70s, recording a handful of albums. She was often likened to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy, some of whose songs Ms. Spaak covered.
Later in her career she hosted a popular Italian talk show called “Harem.”
Catherine Spaak was born on April 3, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris area, to Charles Spaak, a screenwriter, and Claudie Clèves, an actress. After moving to Italy as a teenager, she remained there for the rest of her life and became a naturalized citizen.
She was married four times. Her first husband was the Italian actor and producer Fabrizio Capucci; her second, Johnny Dorelli, was also an actor, and he and Ms. Spaak recorded music together, including the album “Promesse … Promesse …”(1970). She later married Daniel Rey, an architect, and, in 2013, Vladimiro Tuselli.
In addition to Mr. Guidi, she is survived by a daughter, Sabrina Capucci, and her sister, Agnes Spaak.
Mariangela Melato was born in 1941 in Milan. She made her film debut in 1969 in Italian films. In 1980 she made “Flash Gordon” and afterwards travelled to Hollywood to star opposite Ryan O’Neal in “So Fine”. However she did not pursue a career in American movies but returned to Europe and resumed her career there. She died in 2013.
Her obituary by John Francis Lane in “The Guardian:
Mariangela Melato, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 71, was one of Italy‘s most versatile and vivacious actresses, working in theatre and cinema with some of the leading directors of her time. She won international cult status for three films directed by Lina Wertmüller in which she co-starred with Giancarlo Giannini: The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973) and Swept Away (1974), in all of which the controversial Wertmüller mixed sex and politics. Melato had no qualms about submitting with great good humour to the sometimes humiliating situations and explicit dialogue inflicted on the two stars.
Those Wertmüller films made Melato well-known, but she liked to be recognised as an actor rather than a star. Born in Milan, she trained at the city’s Brera Academy. One of the first companies to sign her up was that of the playwright Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, who gave her a part in Fo’s Seventh Commandment: Steal a Little Less. In 1967 Luchino Visconti cast Melato as one of the nuns in his Rome production of Giovanni Testori’s The Nun of Monza, which was closed by the censors.
Melato was more fortunate when she played Olimpia in Luca Ronconi’s adaptation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso at the Spoleto festival in 1969, one of the most highly acclaimed theatrical events of the period. In 1970 she appeared in Rome in another Ronconi production, The Revenger’s Tragedy, but was not available for the overseas tour of Orlando Furioso because her screen career was beginning to take off. Her first film, an offbeat independent production, Thomas (1971), was one of the first horror fantasies by Pupi Avati.
While working with Ronconi she had met Wertmüller, who immediately recognised Melato’s natural comic potential and chose her to partner Giannini in The Seduction of Mimi. Mimi, a Sicilian, thinks he can escape from the mafia who control his home town. After emigrating to Turin, he gets a job at Fiat only because the mafia controls the unions there too. His only consolation is his passionate affair with a communist girl, played by Melato. In Love and Anarchy, Giannini was Tunin, a country bumpkin who comes to Rome to assassinate Mussolini and discovers that his cousin Salomé (Melato at her most scintillating) works in a brothel.
Melato did a musical comedy in Rome and made a film with a more seriously politically committed director, Elio Petri, La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1972), with Gian Maria Volonté as leading man. In Swept Away, she was a jet-setting snob shipwrecked with a communist sailor (Giannini). They end up on a desert island and begin an affair in which she enjoys becoming his slave. They exchange insults in strong language. When she accuses him of being vulgar, he replies: “In love there is no vulgarity. It’s a word invented by you bourgeois people!” Superbly filmed and acted, it was almost unbearably over the top. A 2002 remake directed by Guy Ritchie, and starring Madonna in the Melato role opposite Giannini’s son Adriano, was not a success.
Although Melato and Wertmüller remained close friends, Melato returned to more serious roles, appearing on stage in Euripides, Pirandello and Shakespeare, and for 10 years acting with the Teatro Stabile di Genova. She also appeared on television, most recently in the title role of a 2010 adaptation of Eduardo De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano, in which she gave a deeply moving performance.
She is survived by her sister, the actor Anna Melato.
• Mariangela Melato, actor, born 19 September 1941; died 11 January 2013
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Greta `Gynt was born in 1916 in Oslo, Norway. She made her film debut in Sweden in 1934. Later in the 1930’s she began her career in British films such as in 1939 in “The Dark Eyes of London” with Bela Lugosi. She went to Hollywood to make “Soldiers Three” with Stewart Granger in 1951, her oinly U.S. movie. Her last film was “The Runaway” in 1963. She died in 2000.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
It was said that nobody deliberately went to see British B-films in the 1940s and 1950s, because they formed part of a double feature at the local cinema, where audiences had paid to see the latest Hollywood movie.
However, while waiting for the main picture, filmgoers were often distracted by a comely, blue-eyed and blonde actress attempting to bring some sex and glamour into unsexy unglamorous films. Greta Gynt, who has died aged 83, appeared regularly as a femme fatale, British style, in a number of mostly forgotten programme fillers of the postwar years – although she herself is remembered.
In 1951, for instance, she made an off-screen splash on two occasions. The first was at the 8th Army Alamein reunion at the Royal Albert Hall, when she put her arms around Field Marshal Montgomery and gave him a big kiss; the photograph went round the world.
The following month, her picture was widely seen when she turned up to meet the Queen, at the royal command film performance, wearing a silver lamé strapless gown, with silver hair, silver osprey feathers and a silver fox coat. Gynt was born Margrethe Woxholt in Oslo, and first came to Britain at the age of three with her engineer father, who worked for Vickers Armstrong. Her mother, a costume designer, encouraged her daughter to become an actress (Greta herself sometimes made her own costumes for films). Educated at a convent in Norway, she and her mother returned to England in 1936, where, having changed her name to Gynt after Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, she got a few small stage parts. Then J Arthur Rank put her under contract, with the vain idea of making her into a British Jean Harlow.
One of her first screen appearances was (briefly) in a Hollywood movie, The Road Back (1937), James Whale’s so-so sequel to All Quiet On The Western Front. However, she was first noticed in The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939), in which she played the mistress – and chief suspect – of a murdered footballer. In the same year, she was one of evil doctor Bela Lugosi’s victims in The Human Monster, based on an Edgar Wallace story. She would later appear in two more films adapted from Wallace, The Calendar (1948) and The Ringer (1952).
In the wartime propaganda picture Tomorrow We Live (1942), Gynt played a French patriot who risks her life by becoming the mistress of a German commander to get information about U-boats, and in Mr Emmanuel (1945), she portrayed a German cabaret singer. She was often seen singing (with her own voice) in nightclubs, as, for instance, in Easy Money (1948). Gynt was the cause of smoothie Dennis Price’s death in Dear Murderer (1947), when her husband (Eric Portman) killed Price in order to pin the murder on another of her lovers, and in Mr Perrin And Mr Traill (1948), she played a school matron with whom two rival teachers (David Farrar and Marius Goring) were in love.
As a contrast to such melodramas, she was amusing as Penelope Toop, the former actress who had become a vicar’s wife, in See How They Run (1955), based on the popular farce by Philip King. Now nearing 40, she might have found a new vocation in comedy had she pursued this vein of pictures. But it was not to be: “I’m utterly bored with this femme fatale business,” she announced, before retiring to become a housewife.
Gynt was married four times, her last husband being Frederick Moore, a plastic surgeon, who died in 1983. For the last decade of her life, she lived in a beautifully- furnished Mayfair flat as Mrs Moore, although she was once pointed out to me as the former film star Greta Gynt. A few years ago, I was taken to lunch by an Argentinian film director at the Connaught hotel. When an elegant and handsome elderly woman settled at the next table,
I told my host who she was. He got extremely excited, and went up and kissed her hands, saying that she was still very popular in Argentina, where minor British films, considered exotic, had become something of a cult. She was absolutely delighted, and invited us to join her for lunch. She seemed to glow more brightly than she was allowed in any of her films.
Googie Withers & Greta Gynt
She is survived by a son from her third marriage. Greta Gynt (Margrethe Woxholt), actress, born November 15 1916; died April 2 2000
Yet the man, once memorably described as ‘the bedroom voice in the body of a lorry driver’, who came to be regarded as the epitome of virile Gallic charm, was not in fact French at all. He was born Ivo Livi in the Tuscan village of Monsumano Alto on Oct 13 1921. His father, a Jewish broom manufacturer, soon fled from the Fascists and settled in France. The family followed him to Marseilles, where young Ivo grew up in the back streets. He abandoned school at 11 for a job in a pasta factory. Thereafter he scraped a living as a barber’s assistant and a metal-worker, only escaping from the slums to music halls and the local cinema, which specialised in subtitled Hollywood films. He recalled that he brought himself up ‘on Bogart, Edward G Robinson, the Marx Brothers and Fred Astaire.’
He also learned to imitate Donald Duck. Armed with this talent and a creditable impersonation of Maurice Chevalier, he began performing in local bistros and changed his name to Yves Montand – apparently inspired by his mother’s call to come upstairs, ‘Ivo, monta]’ In 1939 Montand made his stage debut at the Alhambra Theatre, Marseilles, where he sang Dans les plaines du Far West wearing a cardboard cowboy hat. But the singing cowboy had no intention of staying on the waterfront. During the Second World War he worked as a docker, while also taking lessons in dancing, singing, diction and English. When a summons arrived from the Vichy Government, he headed swiftly for Paris. In February 1944 he made his Paris debut and within months was the opening act for Edith Piaf at the Theatre de l’Etoile. Piaf’s protégé became Piaf’s lover. Montand was 24, and the ‘Little Sparrow’, then 33, said she was conquered by his ‘thundering personality, an impression of strength and solidity’. Her admiration did not, however, prevent Piaf from changing his cowboy image in favour of the poetic songs that were to become his trademark, along with the simple brown shirt and trousers he wore on stage.
Montand’s first film role was as Piaf’s boy friend in Etoile sans Lumiere (1946). Next, he replaced the legendary Jean Gabin as the lead in Marcel Carne’s Les Portes de la Nuit (1946). Although ‘a resounding flop’, this film enriched Montand’s music-hall repertoire with some classic songs, acquired from the scenarist Jacques Prevert – including Feuilles Mortes, which remained his signature tune. Montand then joined the crowded ranks of Piaf’s ex-lovers, and descended into what he described as a two-year ‘black hole’. But in 1949 he met the actress Simone Signoret. As she recorded in her memoirs, Nostalgia is Not What it Used to Be (1975): ‘In the course of four days there occurred something dazzling, indiscreet and irreversible.’ They moved into Montand’s apartment on the Place Dauphine and were married in 1951; Deanna Durbin was among the guests at the traditional Provencal wedding, complete with fifes and tambourines, at St Paul de Vence. Afterwards Montand embarked on a musical tour of Europe and North Africa. In 1953 he made his first successful film – Henri-Georges Clouzet’s The Wages of Fear, a harrowing tale of four adventurers hurtling round hairpin bends in Central America with a truckload of nitroglycerine.
Montand won another round of plaudits for his interpretation of the Puritan adulterer John Proctor in The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. The film version of the play, The Witches of Salem, however, which he starred in three years later, was a little too French for American tastes. Meanwhile, under the influence of the ‘politically aware’ Signoret, Montand had been introduced to radical crusading. They became the dynamic duo of the French Left, and were feted in Moscow – where on one occasion they sat up until the early hours, rapt in a debate about freedom with Khrushchev. Montand’s Socialist ardour was dampened by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, however, and he never officially joined the Communist party because it would have prevented him from working in America. His political dexterity paid off. After the execution of Imre Nagy, he publicly criticised the USSR’s foreign policy, and in 1959 he was invited to make his debut in New York. Soon afterwards he was signed up for Let’s Make Love (1960) with Marilyn Monroe. That was precisely what they did. The affaire, which prompted Monroe to call him ‘the most exciting man in the world’, was more memorable than George Cukor’s film.
‘A man can have two, maybe three love affairs whilst he is married,’ Montand declared at the time, ‘but three is the absolute maximum. After that, you’re cheating.’ Next Montand managed to bargain himself out of his contract with 20th-Century Fox by accepting the dubious role of a Cajun bootlegger in an ‘unfilmable’ adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1961). He remained singularly unfastidious about the films he appeared in. Although he co-starred with some of cinema’s most powerful female leads: Ingrid Bergman in Goodbye Again (1961), Shirley MacLaine in My Geisha (1962), Barbra Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), his Hollywood work was undistinguished. He remained essentially a European star. He did some of his best work in films where his politics and his profession coincided; in Alan Resnais’s La Guerre est Finie (1966), for example, a denunciation of the Franco dictatorship, which traced three days in the life of a political refugee.
The peak of his career was probably his classic collaboration with the director Constantin Costa-Gavras. Together they made a series of brilliant, haunting political thrillers: Z (1969), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for the best foreign film; The Confession (1970); and State of Siege (1973). Montand’s achievement was to bring conviction to his parts on both sides of the political coin – it was said that his identification with his role, as the Czech official kidnapped and tortured in The Confession, was ‘so grievously absolute that one would be ashamed to speak in terms of an actor’s performance’
During his ‘Costa-Gavras period’ which ended on a rather low note with Clair de Femme (1979), Montand took on more than a dozen roles with other directors in films which included The Devil by the Tail (1969), Cesar et Rosalie (1972) and Police Python 357 (1976). As his film career went into decline, he returned to his songs. He followed up a popular album, Montand d’hier a aujourd’hui, with a three-month engagement at the Olympia, and then embarked on a lengthy tour of the provinces. In 1982 he had a week-long engagement at the New York Met. During a 90-minute show, Montand sang, danced, mimed and clowned his way through a 28-song repertoire, including early hits such as Autumn Leaves, Luna Park and A Paris. For a while, it seemed as if his career had come full circle, and would end on the musical stage, where it had begun. But, in the late 1980s his screen talent blossomed anew, when he won the part of Cesar Soubeyran, the peasant patriarch with the mind of Machiavelli, in Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette (1987) and Manon des Sources (1988), adapted from the novels by Marcel Pagnol.
In this poignant Provencal tale of innocence betrayed by a conspiracy between evil men and the elements, Montand gave the performance of his career – duplicitous, cruel, and yet so dignified in his final defeat, that audiences were hard put to it not to shed a tear for the old devil. All the time he was filming in Provence, Simone Signoret was dying of cancer. Finally, in 1985, came the end of what he described as ’35 years of life together – a long lease.’ ‘I never allowed myself to reproach Simone,’ he said of his wife, whose appetite for cigarettes, alcohol and food knew no bounds. ‘The more she demolished herself the more I loved her.’ Neither his affaires nor his political defection had come between them. In fact Montand’s love affair with Communism had come to an abrupt end with the Prague Spring. And after Signoret’s death he stepped up his commentaries on the French political scene – to the extent that he was seriously mentioned as a candidate for the 1988 presidential elections. This was the man who had marched with Françoise Sagan and Jean-Paul Sartre, the man who topped a newspaper poll as the Frenchwoman’s ideal companion on a romantic holiday. Now he was a right-wing heavyweight, hosting an economics programme on television.
Once people had wanted to know what it was like to make love to Monroe; now they consulted him about his views on the Strategic Defence Initiative. In the event Montand decided not to stand for the presidency – he said he did not bear comparison with Ronald Reagan. He still kept his hand in with the film industry, notably in his capacity as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987, but also as the proprietor of the Colombe d’Or hotel, at St Paul des Vence, which he turned into a haven for stars Not that he wooed them with any great enthusiasm – while Elizabeth Taylor was eating inside, Montand would be out the back, discussing economics with the locals over a game of petanque. Yves Montand was a singular mixture of bruiser and troubadour. The quality he most admired was resilience – of Margaret Thatcher, he mused, ‘the Falklands was fantastic… show them you won’t be pushed around.’ Yet it was the vulnerability in the baggy eyes that gave him enduring sex appeal, what he himself liked to call ‘twinkle twinkle’. He and his secretary, 36 years his junior, had a son in 1988.
The above “Telegraph” obituary can also be accessed online here.
