Gerard Philipe was one of the major actors in French cinema. He was born in 1922 in Cannes. He made his film debut in 1943 and won stunning acclaim for his performance in “Devil in the Flesh” in 1947. Other movies include “La Ronde” in 1950, “Fanfan La Tulipe” and “Les Belles de Nuit”. Tragically he died at the age of 36 in 1959.
IMDB entry:
In 1940 Gerard left school and his parents wanted him be a lawyer. But soon his mother noticed that he was only interested in acting, although his father was against the idea. After timely intervention from Mark Allégret, who decided he showed some promise, Gerard’s debut was in Claude Dauphin’s play “One plain girl”. After this, Gerard decided to get into the conservatory. He was wonder even in music. He himself used to find necessary sounds – exact, unexpected, and unforeseen. All this helped him to portray amazing characters. Millions of people were inspired by him.
One day Georges Lacombe offered Philipe a part in his movie “Land Without Stars”. Critical reaction was very favourable and he became a star, taking on prominent roles in films such as “The Idiot”, “Devil in the Flesh”, “The Charterhouse of Parma”, “Such a Pretty Little Beach”, “Juliette, or The Key of Dreams”, “Fan-Fan the Tulip”, “Beauties of the Night”, “The Red and the Black”, “The Best Part” and “The Gambler”.
In 1951 Gerard Philipe married Annie. He dreamed of his own home and family, children. Their first child, Ann-Marie, was born in 1954, and in 1956 came Olivie. In 1959 Gerard returned to France. He seemed to be very tired. Doctors then gave him the bad news that he had a liver cancer. “He’ll live 15 days or 6 months”, – they decided. After that Gerard waited for death very calmly. On November 25, 1959 he died.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tea B.,mpicc@caucasus.net
Introduced to the stage in 1942 by actor Claude Dauphin, rave reviews in a 1945 production of “Caligula” opened the doors for him to film stardom.
Dying in 1959 at the peak of his stardom, a French commemorative stamp was issued only two years after his death. Only one other French star, Raimu, has had that honor bestowed upon him.
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Couverture du PARIS MATCH n°143 du 15 décembre 1951 : Gérard PHILIPE de face, dans son costume du “Cid”, lors du week-end de Suresnes avec le TNP, novembre 19
Betsy Von Furstenberg was born in 1931 in Germany. She made her debut on film in Germany and came to the U.S. in 1951. Her film career has been totally on television and include “Adventure in Paradise” in 1960 and “The Defenders” in 1963.
IMDB entry:
This elegant, ladylike 50s Broadway star was born in Heiheim Heusen, German on August 16, 1931, the daughter of Count Franz-Egon von Furstenberg and his wife Elizabeth (Johnson). A lady of privilege, Betsy moved to America growing up and attended Miss Hewitt’s Classes and New York Tutoring School. With designs on acting, she prepared for the theater at the Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner and made her stage debut in New York at the Morosco Theatre in 1951 with “Second Threshold.” She went on to create a gallery of breezy and stylish debutantes and society girls and enjoyed her first major hit playing Myra Hagerman in “Oh, Men! Oh, Women!” in 1953. Her role would be played by Barbara Rush in the 1957 movie version. Betsy continued with prime roles throughout the 1950s in such plays as “The Chalk Garden,” “Child of Fortune,” “Nature’s Way,” “Wonderful Town” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” among others. At the same time she also graced a number of live and taped TV dramas, including ‘Playhouse 90,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Kraft Television Theatre” and a variety of talk shows.
In the 1960s Betsy appeared in another sparkling comedy hit playing the role of Tiffany in “Mary, Mary” starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson. Again, however, when it came time to film the movie version, Betsy was replaced…this time by then-popular TV star Diane McBain. Making her first and only film appearance in the Italian-made _Donne senza nome (1949)_ [Women Without Names], one can only surmise the film career she might have had, had she been able to recreate some of her lovely stage roles. In the 1970s Betsy was seen opposite Maureen Stapleton in “The Gingerbread Lady” and played Sybil in a production of “Private Lives.” Light comedies also came her way with “There’s a Girl in My Soup” (with Don Ameche and Taina Elg), “Absurd Person Singular,” “Status Quo Vadis” and “Avanti!”
Married to Guy Vincent de la Maisoneuve, she retired from the stage in later years but was glimpsed quite often in high society gatherings and theater benefit functions.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Rosemary Murphy was born in 1927 in Munich, Germany. She studied acting in New York at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. She made her stage debut in Germany in 1949 in “Peer Gynt”. Her Broadway debut came in 1950. She gave an incisive performance in the movie “To Kill A Mockingbird” in 1962 and also featured in “Walking Tall” in 1973. She died in July 2014.
Her “Hollywood Reporter” obituary:
Rosemary Murphy, who played the neighbor Miss Maudie in the 1962 classic To Kill a Mockingbird and earned an Emmy Award and three Tony nominations during her distinguished career, has died. She was 89.
Murphy, who won her Emmy for portraying the mother of Franklin Delano Rooseveltin the 1976 ABC miniseries Eleanor and Franklin, died Saturday in her Upper East Side apartment in New York City, her longtime agent, Alan Willig, told The Hollywood Reporter. She recently was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
In To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), the acclaimed film drama based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Murphy played Maudie Atkinson, who lives across the street from attorney Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) and helps teach his children lessons about racism and human nature.
“You knew you were in something special. It was a fascinating experience,” Murphy said about making the film in a 2012 interview with The Daily Beast. “I was very respectful of where I was and thrilled to be there. Gregory Peck was accessible and a real gent.”
With her death, Robert Duvall is believed to be the last adultMockingbird castmember still alive.
After Eleanor and Franklin, Murphy collected a second Emmy nom for playing Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt in the follow-up telefilm Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977).
Murphy’s Tony noms, all for best actress in a play, came in 1961 for her work as Dorothea Bates inTennessee Williams’ Period of Adjustment; in 1964 for Any Wednesday, in which she starred opposite Gene Hackman; and in 1967 for Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which also starredHume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.
She appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, from 1950’s The Tower Beyond Tragedythrough 1999’s Waiting in the Wings, written by Noel Coward.
On film, Murphy stood out as prostitute Callie Hacker in the Joe Don Baker revenge tale Walking Tall(1973). She also appeared in The Young Doctors (1961); the 1966 film version of Any Wednesday that starred Jane Fonda; the killer rodent sequel Ben (1972); 40 Carats (1973), with Liv Ullmann; Julia (1977), again with Fonda; September (1987), with Elaine Stritch; Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite(1995); and Synecdoche, New York (2008).
In the 1976 NBC telefilm A Case of Rape, Murphy played a ruthless D.A. who cross-examines a rape victim (Elizabeth Montgomery) and wins acquittal for the man who attacked her. She also had a regular role in the 1970s NBC drama series Lucas Tanner, starring David Hartman.
Her TV résumé also includes playing kleptomaniac Loretta Fowler on the NBC daytime drama Another World and guest-starring stints on such shows as The Virginian, Ben Casey, The Fugitive, Cannon,Medical Center, Trapper John, M.D., Murder, She Wrote and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
Murphy was born in Munich, the daughter of a U.S. diplomat. She studied acting in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio.
She never married. Survivors include her sister Mildred and nephew Greg. A memorial will be held in Manhattan in September, her nephew said.
Nina Van Pallandt was born in 1932 in Denmark. She and her husband were a famous folk duo in the early 1960’s and were known as ‘Nina and Frederick’. She had a leading role in 1973 in Robert Altman’s Philip Marlowe Private Eye’s “The Long Goodbye” with Elliot Gould. She also starred with Paul Newman in “Quintet” in 1979 and “American Gigolo” opposite Richard Gere in 1980.
IMDB Entry:
Nina Van Pallandt became famous in the United States in the early 1970s as the mistress of hoaxer Clifford Irving, who went to jail when his biography of Howard Hughes, allegedly written with Hughes’ co-operation, proved to be a fake when Hughes himself came out of seclusion to repudiate the work. Van Pallandt helped expose Irving’s fraud by revealing that he was vacationing with her in Mexico at the time he was allegedly interviewing Hughes. She appears, as herself, in Orson Welles‘ non-fiction film “F For Fake” (F for Fake (1973)). Van Pallandt was known in Europe as a singer of folk songs before her involvement with Irving and subsequent film career, having been married to her fellow folk singer, Baron Frederik van Pallandt, with whom she toured Europe and had many hit records as “Nina & Frederik”. The height of Van Pallandt’s film career was her appearance in four Robert Altman movies: The Long Goodbye (1973), A Wedding (1978), Quintet (1979) and O.C. and Stiggs (1985).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Guy Lazarus
Frederick obituary from 1994 in “The Independent”:
Frederik had not performed together for nearly 30 years. But the death of Frederik van Pallandt in what police in the Philippines have described as a mysterious professional killing, brings to a final end an era of sweet, slightly folk-tinged singing that, in their heyday, placed van Pallandt and his then wife Nina at the top of the international popular music tree, with sell-out Royal Albert Hall concerts, and at least five chart entries (one song twice) between 1959 and 1961.
Nina & Frederick
They first made their mark in Britain at Christmas 1959 with a revival of ‘Mary’s Boy Child’, which had been a hit for Harry Belafonte two years earlier, followed by another religious song, ‘Little Donkey’, which was in the charts for 10 weeks between November 1960 and February 1961. It reached No 3. They released two different albums called Nina and Frederik, the first of them reaching the Top 10 for albums in February 1960, and the second No 11 in April/May 1961.
Much was made of their aristocratic origins. Frederik was a baron, and the son of a former Ambassador for the Netherlands to Denmark, and Nina had simliar connections with the Danish and American social registers. Though they principally used material from the Third World – like another Belafonte hit, ‘Long Time Boy’, in September 1961, and ‘Sucu Sucu’ the following month – they were really part of the soft underbelly of folk, represented by a number of such duos – one thinks immediately of the Israeli Ofarim, who had a similarly glamorous woman partner with a pretty-boy male counterpart – whose hegemony was decisively put to an end by the tongue-in-cheek antics of Sonny and Cher, as well as the more carefully crafted tones of Peter Paul and Mary.
But it was not a shift in musical tast that dislodged them from their brief pinnacle of fame. Never particularly fond of the spotlight that success shone upon their lives, Frederik broke up the partnership by insisting that they retire, though Nina carved out a solo career for herself thereafter, followed by acting roles in films such as Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and A Wedding (1979), and Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980).
Frederik invested his chart profits in a number of ventures, farming for a while in Ibiza – where Nina was a close neighbour – and becoming owner of Burke’s Peerage for a short time in 1979.
Though the couple separated and eventually divorced in 1976, they remained friends until Frederik’s death, from gunshot wounds, along with his second wife, Susannah. It was a measure of their continuing closeness that Nina flew out to the Philippines to bring his body home to Europe.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Albert Lieven was born in Germany in 1906. He fled to Britain in 1937 before the outbreak of World War Two. He made his movie debut in the UK some afterwards in “Victoria the Great” starring Anna Neagle. His films include “Frieda” in 1947, “Sleeping Car to Trieste” and “Conspiracy of Hearts” where he was an evil nazi major opposite Lilli Palmer as a nun. He died in 1971. He is the grandfather of rugby player Toby Flood.
IMDB entry:
German actor, on stage from 1928, who fled the Nazis during the war years, only to portray Nazi menacers in British films. Maternal grandfather of Newcastle and England rugby player Toby Flood. Grew up in East Prussia. First acted on stage at the Hoftheater in Gera in 1928, subsequently in the ensemble cast at the Preussische Staatstheater in Berlin. Left Germany because of his Jewish wife, Petra Peters. In England from 1936, appearing on stage and featuring in BBC foreign service radio broadcasts. From 1939 to 1952, affiliated with the Rank Organisation as a character actor. On Broadway in 1948. Returned to German film and TV in 1952.
His family produced a dynasty of noted physicians. His father was a lung specialist.
Bella Darvi had a short high profile career in some major 20th Century Fox films of the Hollywood of the 1950’s. She was born in 1928 in Poland. Her first film was “Hell and High Water” opposite Richard Widmark in 1954. Other movies were “The Egyptian” with Edmund Purdom and “The Racers” with Kirk Douglas. Her Hollywood career was over by 1955. She returned to making films in Europe. She died in 1971 in Monte Carlo.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Bella Darvi became a 50s symbol for one of the many movie “Cinderellas” whose bright and beautiful Hollywood fairy tale would come crashing down, ending in bitterness and tragedy.
A self-destructive brunette beauty, her life was full of misfortune. Of Polish/French descent, she miraculously survived the tortures of a WWII concentration camp as a youth, only to get caught up in the phony glitter and high-living style of Monaco’s casinos as a young adult in Europe.
Bella Darvi
An inveterate gambler and drinker, she was, by chance, “discovered” by movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck and his wife, Virginia Fox, who thought she had a foreign cinematic allure à la Ingrid Bergman. Despite her lack of acting experience, the Zanucks paid off her gambling debts and whisked her away to Hollywood to be groomed for stardom. Her marquee name “Darvi” was derived from the combined first names of her mentors. It should have been a dream-come-true opportunity. Fate, however, would not be so kind. After three high profile roles in The Egyptian (1954), Hell and High Water (1954) and The Racers (1955) opposite three top male films stars (Victor Mature, Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas, respectively),
Darvi’s limited abilities were painfully transparent. Not only was she hampered by an ever-so-slight crossed-eyed appearance, she had a trace of a lisp which, combined with a foreign accent, made her speech appear slurred and difficult to understand. It didn’t take long for the actress to go off the deep end. Within a short time, a major sex scandal involving Mr. Zanuck had wife Virginia packing Darvi’s bags and any “career” she once had here in America was over.
Bella Darvi
She retreated back to Europe, made a few inconsequential films, and quickly returned to her adverse habits — liquor and the gambling tables. But this time there was no one to save her. Mounting debts and despair eventually turned her thoughts to suicide.
After several attempts, Darvi finally succeeded in 1971 after turning on the gas stove in her apartment. She was only 42.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Fernand Gravey was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1905. He made his first film (a silent) in 1913. He began his career in French and British films and then went to Hollywood in 1937. His most famous movie was “The Great Waltz” with Luise Rainer. He returned to France before the Nazi occupation. His later films included “La Ronde” with Simone Simon in 1950. He died in France in 1970.
One of director Alfred Machin’s favorite actresses was Fernande Dépernay of the Théâtre des Galeries. Dépernay was married to Georges Mertens, another of Machin’s regular actors. Their son, Fernand Mertens, born in 1904. He made his acting debut in ‘Saïda Makes Off with Manneken Pis’ and in 1914 played the role of little Kef in ‘A Tragedy in the Clouds’ alongside his parents. Much later, under the pseudonym Fernand Garvey, he went to become one of France’s most renowned actors.
Herbert Lom was born in 1917 in Prague. He came to Britain in 1939 and soon established himself as a popular young character actor often in villianous roles. His cinema debut was in “The Young Mr Pitt” in 1942. Among his film career highlights are “The Seventh Veil”, “Night and the City”, “Hell’s Drivers”, “North West Frontier” and “El Cid”. In 1954 he starred opposite Valerie Hobson in the London stage production of “The King and I”. His last credit to date is in “Murder at the Vicarage” which he made when he was 87 years of age. He died in 2012 at the age of 95.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Herbert Lom, who has died aged 95, spent more than 50 years in dramatic roles, playing mostly smooth villains, but he was best known for his portrayal of Charles Dreyfus, the hysterically twitching boss of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) in the series of slapstick Pink Panther comedies. “Give me 10 men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world,” blurts out the bewildered Dreyfus in A Shot in the Dark (1964).
Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru was born into an impoverished aristocratic family in Prague. He studied philosophy at Prague University, where he organised student theatre. In 1939, on the eve of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, he arrived in Britain with his Jewish girlfriend, Didi, but she was sent back at Dover because she did not have the correct papers. Her subsequent death in a concentration camp haunted him all his life.
Because of his linguistic abilities, Lom worked for the BBC European Service during the second world war, while building an acting career in British films with his newly shortened name. He had already appeared in small parts in two Czech films. In his first British film, Carol Reed’s The Young Mr Pitt (1941), he played Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he resembled. It was the first of his three incarnations of, in Lom’s words, the “much-maligned gentleman”. The others were in War and Peace (1956) – while on location in Italy, hundreds of members of the Italian army, playing extras in the battle scenes, queued up to shake Lom’s hand – and in William Douglas-Home’s play Betzi, in a West End production in 1975.
With his penetrating brown eyes, saturnine looks and foreign accent, Lom was typecast as psychiatrists or sinister crooks. In The Seventh Veil (1945), he used his rich, deep voice to guide a concert pianist, Ann Todd, through her past with the aid of drugs and hypnosis. Almost two decades later, Lom had a similar role in the TV series The Human Jungle (1963-64) as a specialist in emotional distress who listens to his patients’ problems while being unable to cope with his teenage daughter. “A boring part,” Lom admitted. “All I had to do was sit behind a desk saying, ‘And vot happened next?’, and the terribly interesting patient got all the good bits.”
Lom was more active as a heavy, his lightly flavoured Czech accent serving for French, Spanish, Arab, Greek or Turk. In Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), he played Kristo, a Greek racketeer who orders the murder of a petty crook, Richard Widmark. He was a devious pirate chieftain in Spartacus (1960) and Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island (1961), and took the title role in the Hammer production The Phantom of the Opera (1962). He stole the limelight in many a film from the nominal stars: playing a flamboyant Polish officer posing as a foreign agent in Rough Shoot (1953); a French count who steals the eponymous jewel in Star of India (1954), and Ahmad Shahbandar, the richest man in the world, in Gambit (1966). In these three films he ran rings around, respectively, Joel McCrea, Cornel Wilde and Michael Caine.
Lom failed to get satisfaction from such roles and never had the chance to realise his full potential on screen, but he nevertheless scowled effectively all the way to the bank. “When you are tempted to say no, they offer you so much money it would be irresponsible to one’s family, to one’s children, to refuse.” In 1948 he married Dina, with whom he had two sons. They lived in London, the Canary Islands and the French Riviera. The couple divorced in 1971. Lom subsequently married and divorced twice more and had a daughter with the potter Brigitte Appleby.
Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955) was one of the few films that Lom looked upon with affection. As the most menacing of the gang trying to bump off an old lady, he ends up falling backwards off a railway bridge, landing in a passing goods wagon. The reason Lom wore a hat throughout the film was because his head had been shaved for his role in the musical The King and I at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Although not as singular a figure as Yul Brynner as the Siamese king, Lom proved to be just as imposing.
Lom, who worked with Sellers in The Ladykillers, was delighted to be cast as Clouseau’s superior in A Shot in the Dark, Blake Edwards’s follow-up to The Pink Panther. “I owe Blake the fact that I’ve been doing comedy,” Lom remarked. “When he called me for the first time, he said, ‘You’ve been the heavy so often, but I think you’re a funny man.'”
In The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Lom ends up in a straitjacket, writing “Kill Clouseau” on the walls of his padded cell with his toes. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), he escapes from the asylum and becomes a master criminal. Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) has him driven crazy again. Lom would twitch more frenetically as the films became progressively less funny.
It was then back to heavy duty as the devious Dr Hartz in the superfluous 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes and he was Christopher Walken’s therapist in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983), trying to help his patient, who has come out of a coma, to cope with being able to see the future. Lom then played a corrupt South American dictator in Whoops Apocalypse (1988), and a Vatican mafioso in The Pope Must Die (1991). His last appearance was on television as a suspicious French professor in an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage (2004), with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.
Lom, a delightful raconteur, music lover and amateur painter, who had a fine collection of 20th-century masterpieces, also wrote two entertaining and scholarly books: Dr Guillotine (1993), a novel about the inventor of a “humane” form of execution, and Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe (1978). “When I’m writing, there’s nobody watching me,” he explained. “It’s a terrible thing to be watched, either by the audience or by the camera.” It was a curious admission from an actor seldom away from the screen.
He is survived by his children.
• Herbert Lom (Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru), actor, born 11 September 1917; died 27 September 2012
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Michele Mercier was born in 1939 in Nice, France. At the age of seventeen, she came to Paris and joined Roland Petet’s dancing company. She had a small role in Francois Truffaut’s “Shoot the Pianist” in 1960. In 1963 she starred in “Angelique” from the novel of the same name, which became a popular box office success internationally. She made films outside of her native country including “The Call of the Wild” in 1972.
IMDB entry:
For Michèle Mercier, the role of Angélique, “the Marquise of the Angels”, was both a blessing and a curse. It catapulted her to almost instant stardom, rivalling Brigitte Bardot in her celebrity and popularity, but ruined her acting career. The character of Angélique made to forget the other aspects of the career of Mercier, but it is true that general public discovered her only in “Angélique”, and made her a real star of the French cinema of that time. By the end of the 1960s, the names Angélique and Michèle Mercier were synonymous, and to escape type-casting, Mercier was compelled to leave France and try to re-start her career in United States, unfortunately without any success.
Daughter of Nice’s pharmacists, born on January 1st, 1939 and named as Jocelyne Yvonne Renée, she initially wanted to be a dancer. Wartime, no money to buy food, but little Jocelyne wept all week, cadging father, wellknown pharmacist in Nice, to buy her balletskirts and points. In return she promised to work in drug-store. Father took this only as childish whim. But little girl got her wish through: of “small ballet-rat”, as they call little dancers, who participate in stageshows, she grew up to soloist in Opera of Nice. Then came Paris. First she was engaged to the troupe of Roland Petit, then she danced in the company of the “Ballets of the Eiffel tower”. At 15, she met Maurice Chevalier, who predicted her success and glory. They did arrive, but by another way that the dance. Parallel to her career as dancer, Jocelyne followed courses of dramatic art in the class of Solange Sicard. Her début in French cinema was for Mercier another compromise: her birthname seemed too long and too old-fashioned for movie credits. What, if she’ll take a name Michèle? She winced – this was name of her little sister, who died at the age of five by the fever typhoide, but she agreed. And it was also as in testimony of admiration for her partner Michèle Morgan, as she borrowed her name to her. After some romantic comedies and a small role in François Truffaut’s “Shoot the pianist” (1960; her favorite role), she approaches the Sixties mainly in the cinema of district. She also worked in England and made then mainly small-budget films in Italy, always in the same register of easy girl. To this moment Michèle already competed with Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, continuously shooting in Italy. She needed a role, which could make her a star. Only in 1963, when was decided to make movie by sensational novel “Angélique”, Michèle got this kind of chance.
Many actresses were approached to play the role of Angélique. The Producer Francis Cosne absolutely wanted Brigitte Bardot for the part. She refused, but later judged Michèle Mercier to be fantastic in it. Annette Stroyberg was considered next, but judged not to be sufficiently well-known. Catherine Deneuve was too pale, Jane Fonda spoke French with an American accent, and Virna Lisi was busy in Hollywood. The most serious actress considered was Marina Vlady. She almost sign a contract, but Michèle Mercier won the role after trying out for it – which she did not appreciate very much since she was being treated like a beginner while she was already a big star in Italy. At the time she was contacted to play Angélique, she had already acted in over twenty movies. During four years she made five Angélique-movies, enjoying the real success. Nevertheless the moment came, when she finally wanted to interrupt with this aggravating character. Michèle played with Jean Gabin in “The Thunder of God” of Denys de la Patellière. Then with Robert Hossein in “La seconde vérité” of Christian-Jaque… But the time has gone. That was also confirmed by Mercier’s flop in Hollywood… What life didn’t taught her, that’s the skill how to dominate men. Every time Michèle captivated regardlessly. She was deceived, betrayed. She suffered. “Men in their way, shattered my life. What I wanted from them? Real, mutual love. What they wanted – no hard to guess,” candidly confessed Michèle after sensational story with a shah, who overwhelmed actress with diamonds and bouquets of flowers, and then tryed to rape her. Press enjoyed Michèle’s love affairs and divorces. For some reason or other, in real life this beautiful and kind woman met only rascals, without exception. First husband turned out to be alcoholic. With well known racer Claude Bourillot she lived together 12 years. And she was shocked, when in one day she found out that he vanished with her jewels. Full of dramatism was story of her romance with Italian prince N., who after many years of courtship got intimate with Michèle and at the end betrayed her, refusing to marry her. Incidentally, all these failures even more hardened the character of Michèle Mercier. After a very long eclipse, she decided to return to the cinema. In 1998, the actress made in Cuba and in Italy “La Rumbera”, a feature film by Italian director Piero Vivarelli. In 1999, swindled of several million francs in a business venture, Mercier had serious financial problems. She even planned to sell famous wedding gown of the Marquise of the Angels. The actress confessed in Nice Matin: “I am ruined, I’ll be obliged to sell part of my paintings, my furnitures, my properties, my jewels and the costumes of Angélique”. In 2002, she presented at the Cannes Film Festival her second book of memories in which she affirms in the cover that “she’s not Angélique!”, entrusting her irritation to be summarized to this glamour-image of the Sixties. In this book Mercier also tells about how Italian actor Vittorio Gassman tried to take her by force, but remembers also the gentility of Marcello Mastroianni and the suppers of Bettino Craxi, former Prime Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi. In the end she admits: “All the men who have made the court of me, tried to seduce Angélique… not me. But then one day I understood that Angelique could not make more harm to me, therefore I have learned to consider she’s like a little sister, with whom I had to live hand in hand”.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Ivar Kümnik
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
