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.
New of the death – at the age of 74 – of Steve Reeves, the American body-building champion and star of 1950s mythological movies like Hercules, termed his films “European-made”. They were, in fact, “Italian-made”, though they made him the highest-paid European star of the time.
His first film, made in Rome in 1957 by the director Pietro Francisci, and called in Italian Le Fatiche di Ercole (The Labours Of Hercules), was to launch a box-office genre for the Italian cinema, much as with spaghetti westerns a few years later.
Ironically, Reeves came close to becoming the symbol of that second cult genre too. When Mario Bonnard, the director making The Last Days Of Pompeii in 1959, fell ill during shooting, the film was finished by Sergio Leone, who, watching Reeves at work as the centurion, thought seriously of casting him as the nameless cowboy in A Fistful Of Dollars.
Steve Reeves
Reeves later told an Italian journalist: “I turned the part down because it seemed to me impossible that the Italians could make a western. I was wrong. And Clint Eastwood was perfect for the part.” Reeves also said that he had been offered the part of James Bond before Sean Connery.
Even though he was born in Montana, the same state as his childhood hero Gary Cooper, the young Reeves never aspired to become an actor; indeed, most of the Italian directors who worked with him thought he never became one. It was, of course, his muscles that made him famous.
He won the Mr America title in 1947, when he was 21, and followed it up by becoming, first, Mr World, and then Mr Universe (twice, in 1948 and 1950). He was tested by De Mille for the lead in Samson And Delilah, but apparently Victor Mature was preferred.
A photo of Reeves, as the young Mr Universe, reached Francisci’s casting desk when he was preparing the Hercules film in 1957. There was an illustrious precedent for putting muscles before acting talent in casting mythological heroes.
What is generally considered the first masterpiece in cinema history, Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), featured a strongman character, Maciste, whose name was invented by the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. He was played by a docker from Genoa.
The idea of returning to the mythological genre had come from scriptwriter Ennio de Concini, who had great difficulty finding a producer. I remember being summoned to a press conference in Rome when Reeves arrived to start filming. None of us journalists had ever heard of him, and didn’t think he would make a good story.
The projected film seemed like a potboiler, and it only became a cult event when the enterprising American producer, Joe Levine, bought it, dubbed it into English and spent $1m launching it in the US – it made him a fortune.
The market soon became saturated with imitations, and both ancient history and mythology were ransacked for muscular heroes. Reeves himself became the muscle-man most in demand, but as his salary increased proportionately, producers were signing up anybody who had won a bodybuilding contest.
Most of them had even less acting potential than Reeves, but a former Tarzan, Gordon Scott, was his top competitor. They appeared together in Romulus And Remus, made in 1962 by Sergio Corbucci, one of the best genre directors of Cine Città. Corbucci said that Reeves’s muscles “seemed made of cornflour”, and that when he had to lift actress Virna Lisi in the air (she couldn’t have weighed more than 50 kilos), he dropped her. During that film, Reeves left Scott with a broken nose, although apparently by accident.
During the filming of The Last Days Of Pompeii, Reeves dislocated his shoulder when his chariot slammed into a tree, but he continued working in Italy and was to star in 18 films over the next decade. Among his pictures was an off-beat Thief Of Baghdad, directed in 1960 by the documentarist Bruno Vailati. Although he’d missed out on A Fistful Of Dollars, he did do a western in 1968, his last film before returning to America, A Long Ride From Hell.
Reeves married his secretary, Aline, and they settled on a ranch in California, where he bred horses. He continued to take an interest in fitness, wrote a workout guide, Building The Classic Physique The Natural Way, and instructed others in bodybuilding, which he believed could help youngsters turn away from drugs.
His wife died in 1989.
Steve Reeves, bodybuilder and actor, born January 21 1926; died May 1 2000
Silvana Mangano was born in Rome in 1930 of an English mother and an Italian father. She came to international fame for her role in “Bitter Rice” in 1939. Her other films include “Anna” in 1951, “Gold of Naples”, “Mambo”, “Death in Venice” and “Conversation Piece”. She died in 1989.
TCM Overview:
Beautiful leading lady who came to international prominence as a struggling, scantily-clad peasant in Giuseppe De Santis’ neorealist drama, “Bitter Rice” (1949). Mangano later proved her ability in films by such directors as Vittorio De Sica (“Gold of Naples” 1954), Pier Paolo Pasolini (“Teorema” 1968) and Luchino Visconti (“Death in Venice” 1971). She married producer Dino DeLaurentiis in 1949 and appeared in a number of his films, as well as one–“Dune” (1985)–produced by their daughter Raffaella DeLaurentiis.
New York Times obituary in 1989:
Silvana Mangano, the Italian film actress who created a sensation as a passionately earthy peasant in ”Bitter Rice” in 1948 and shaped increasingly compelling characterizations in later movies, died yesterday in Madrid. She was 59 years old and had been hospitalized in a coma for several days.
Representatives of the Luz Hospital in Madrid told The Associated Press that the actress had suffered a heart attack there during surgery for a tumor between her lungs. She had been suffering from cancer for several years.
Miss Mangano’s three daughters, Veronica, Rafaella and Francesca, flew to Madrid to be with her, the Spanish National Radio reported. Federico, the actress’s only son, died in a plane crash in 1981 while making a film in Alaska, prompting her to go into seclusion for several years.
Their father is Dino De Laurentiis, the producer whom Miss Mangano married in 1949 soon after the release of ”Bitter Rice,” his first international success. They avoided publicity in their private lives and seemed happy, but they separated in 1983 and began divorce proceedings last year. Made 30 Films
The actress worked with many of Italy’s leading directors, including Alberto Lattuada, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti, but she made only 30 films, preferring to spend time with her family.
Her roles included a sensitive prostitute in ”Gold of Naples” (1954), a loveless movie goddess in ”The Witches” (1967), a cool aristocrat in ”Death in Venice” (1971) and the wealthy, rejected wife of Marcello Mastroianni in ”Dark Eyes” (1987). Other films were ”Ulysses” (as both Penelope and Circe, 1954), ”Barabbas” (1961), ”Oedipus Rex” (1967), ”Ludwig” (1973) and ”Conversation Piece” (1975).
Miss Mangano was born in Rome on April 21, 1930, one of four children of Amedeo Mangano, a railroad employee, and an Englishwoman, the former Ivy Webb. She studied dancing, won the title Miss Rome 1946 in a beauty contest, modeled and got minor parts in several movies before gaining the leading role in ”Bitter Rice” as a lustful rice harvester in the Po Valley. Contrast to Private Life
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times reflected international approval in hailing her as a sensation. He said she embodied ”Anna Magnani minus 15 years, Ingrid Bergman with a Latin disposition and Rita Hayworth plus 25 pounds.”
David Thomson, the film historian and critic, said in recalling ”Bitter Rice” that its social comment ”was swamped by its popular elements, chief of which was Mangano, her skirts tucked up, standing in the rice fields and leaving no doubts in the viewer’s mind.”
Miss Mangano’s sensual film image contrasted with her private life, in which she wore conservative clothes and no makeup. In her maturity, she was a cool, sculptured, high-fashion beauty whose penchants included tennis, horseback riding and well-prepared food.
Besides her children, survivors include two sisters, Patrizia and Natasha.
The hospital gave no information regarding funeral or memorial services. The Spanish national news agency EFE quoted a family representative as saying Miss Mangano’s body would be cremated today and the remains sent to New York to be placed next to those of her son
Scilla Gabel was born in Riminini in Italy in 1938. Her movie debut was in “Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure” in 1959. Her other credits include “Modesty Blaise” in 1966 and “Target for Killing”.
Page on “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” here.
