Jacqueline Sassard was one of the most beautiful of actresses on film in the 1960’s. She was born in France in 1940. She made her film debut in 1956 and among her credits are “The Magistrate” in 1960, “Seasons of Our Love”, Joseph Losey’s “Accident” opposite Stanley Baker, Dirk Bogarde and Michael York and “Les Biches” in 1968. She received stunning reviews for these last three films so it is surprising that she ceased making films in 1968 at the age of only 28.
Her final screen appearance was in Le voleur de crimes (Crime Thief), directed by Nadine Trintignant in 1969.
She left the film industry on her marriage to Gianni Lancia.
They lived for a number years in Brazil before returning to live in Alpes-Maritimes in the south of France. They had a son, Lorenzo Lancia. Gianni Lancia died in 2014.
Sarita Montiel was born in 1928 in Spain. In 1954 she starred in the U.S movie “Vera Cruz” opposite Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. Her other films include “Serenade” with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine and “Run of the Arrow”. She was married to the late great film director Anthony Mann. She died in 2013.
“Independent” obituary by :Alasdair Fotheringham
Sara Montiel is widely considered one of Spain’s greatest female film stars of the 20th century: but it is perhaps more for what she managed, with huge skill, to come to symbolise than for her artistic output that she will be remembered long-term
It is true that she was the first Spanish actress to conquer Hollywood in the 1950s, acting alongside Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper – and her beauty helped her gain a trail of lovers and husbands that ranged from Hemingway (who taught her to smoke cigars) to the film director Anthony Mann.
But for the vast majority of Spaniards during Franco’s era, Montiel simply represented everything that seemed completely unimaginable: international glamour, ridiculous affluence, and a voluptuous feminine sexuality that did not give two hoots for the country’s repressive social mores. As La Vanguardia newspaper put it in its obituary, “In an era of black shawls and hard bread, she kept us in touch with the times.”
Montiel’s fame in Spain reached the point where for over two decades her plunging necklines, richly erotic deep voice and sensual singing of cuplés – a type of popular, often romantic song – in a series of otherwise forgettable movies acted as a kind of pressure valve for censor-bound Spanish society.
El Último Cuplé (“The Last Cuplé”, 1957), a low-budget film which combined cuplés with the classic contemporary Spanish movie format (femme fatale plus willing-to-be-seduced bullfighter plus bullfighter’s morally pure bride-to-be, equals sweeping melodrama) was the biggest of her box-office smashes. Its title song, “Fumando Espero” (“I wait whilst smoking”), recorded in a voice that the producer insisted Montiel made so husky and low she protested she would end up sitting underneath the piano, remained a major hit for years afterwards.
But as much as what she did or how she looked, what fascinated Spaniards was who she knew – which in 1950s Hollywood was just about everybody. In the last photo of a living James Dean, he is next to Montiel, both of them laughing. Friends included Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Holiday and Brando.
Her list of lovers, affairs and broken hearts stretched from Dean (whose fatal car crash happened after “an afternoon of love” with her, or so she claimed), to playwright Miguel Mihura, Indalecio Prieto, one of the top ministers in the former Spanish Republic, and even the 1959 Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Severo Ochoa. (Montiel described him as “the great love of my life… but him researching all day and me making films all day just didn’t match.”)
For ordinary Spaniards, another appealing side of Montiel was her working-class background. Montiel was born and brought up in Campo de Criptana, a tiny town on the empty plains of central Castille, before moving to the Valencian coast as a teenager. Her father’s income was so meagre as a field worker, she later claimed that she would dig up roots to eat. (If this recalls Scarlet O’Hara grubbing for potatoes in Gone with the Wind, then it would not be the first or last time that fact and fiction blurred in her life.)
Discovered when singing a religious song by film producer Vicente Casanova in 1944, aged 15, her first film was Te Quiero Para Mí (“I Want You for Me”). Six years and 14 films later, including successes like Locura de Amor (“The Madness of Love”, 1948), she started working in Mexico, performing mostly singing roles. Piel Canela (1953), in which she played a gangster’s moll in a Havana nightclub, saw her shoot up the ladder to Hollywood’s top circle of film stars, despite not speaking a word of English – the first Spanish actress ever to do so.
Together with Gary Cooper (with whom she had a much-publicised romance) she took part in the Western Vera Cruz (1954) and then, while playing a secondary role in Joan Fontaine’s Serenade, she met and fell in love with Anthony Mann. Their wedding, as it was a civil one, was downplayed in Franco’s Spain, as was the divorce in 1961 – in stark contrast to when she married Spanish businessman Jose Vicente Ramirez in 1964 in a massive Catholic church ceremony. (The fact that it only lasted a couple of months before they separated was discreetly ignored).
By then, her cachet as a sex symbol had mushroomed thanks to El Último Cuplé, which kicked off a series of films – La Bella Lola (“Beautiful Lola”, 1962), Noches De Casablanca (“Casablanca Nights”, 1963), La Dama de Beirut (“The Lady of Beirut”, 1965) – which, if unremarkable in their content, gave Montiel a vast following of fans in Spain.
The end of the dictatorship in 1975, though, meant that her appeal suddenly shrank; but Montiel made the perfect sideways move. She began a seemingly interminable series of TV chat show appearances, while well-timed interviews with “intimate revelations” in gossip magazines kept her star from fading.
As if that were not enough, she wrote biographies with suggestive titles like Sara and Sex (2003); sung rap music in her seventies; and, in 2002, married a Cuban film producer 36 years her junior – all of which helped to ensure that she maintained a certain presence.
“I am not your ‘typical woman’,” she said last year. “Not at all. I am 84 and I don’t have a lot of time left. But in the last 54 years there’s been nobody like me.”
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
RUN OF THE ARROW, aka YUMA, US poster art, Sara Montiel aka Sarita Montiel, Rod Steiger, 1957. Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDRUOF EC058
Sven Bertil-Taube was born in Stockholm in 1934. He is a reknowned folk singer who has also acted in movies. Among his films are “Puppet on a Chain” with Barbara Parkins in 1971 and “The Eagle Has Landed”. Most recently he has starred in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”.
The great boxer Max Schmeling was born in 1905 in Brandenburg, Germany. He was World Heavyweight Champion from 1930 to 1932. He was married to actress Anna Ondra. He was featured in the films “Liebe in Ring” in 1930 and “Knockout” in 1935. After retiring from the ring, he became a very wealthy businessman and died in his 100th year in 2005.
His “Guardian” obituary by Mike Lewis:
Max Schmeling, Germany’s former world heavyweight champion, who has died aged 99, will primarily be remembered as the boxer who lost the most politically charged sporting bout in history. That was his crushing, one-round defeat by the American Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber”, at New York’s Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938.
From the opening bell, Louis, the champion, tore into Schmeling and sent him staggering around the ring under a merciless assault. Schmeling, dropped three times, was bewildered, semi-conscious and slumped on all fours when rescued by the referee, after one of the most savage onslaughts ever seen in a prize ring. The victory of Louis, after two minutes and four seconds, was his most awesome performance.
It was the approach of the second world war that transformed the nature of the fight and made Schmeling an unwilling propaganda tool of the Nazis. The confrontation was sold as a fight between a member of Hitler’s “master race” and an American black, and assumed huge symbolic importance.
There were calls to “boycott Nazi Schmeling” and he protested in vain that this was “just another fight”. While, despite Louis’s assertion that he was fighting for “the good old USA”, white reporters from southern states – where Jim Crow white supremacist racialseg regation ruled – openly hankered for a German victory. Even as Schmeling, nicknamed “Hitler’s show-horse”, had tea with the Führer on his way to the title challenge bout, German troops massed on the borders of Czechoslovakia.
The drama began on June 19, 1936, when Schmeling caused the “sensation of the century” by knocking out Louis in the 12th round of a non-title bout. That defeat for Louis – his first in 28 fights – caused riots in Harlem. A man who had backed Schmeling was stabbed and had his skull fractured.
Schmeling’s success happened two months before the Nazi attempt to use the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for white, Aryan supremacy (ruined by the triumph of black American athlete Jesse Owens).
Schmeling’s future would have been different had he lost that first encounter with Louis. During the build-up, friendly US sportswriters described the German as gentlemanly, sportsmanlike and courageous. Their attitude changed dramatically when Schmeling, a huge underdog, flattened the unbeaten Louis with a straight right.
The fight was almost ignored by the Nazi press, after Hitler privately questioned the wisdom of taking on the invincible American; but Schmeling’s shock victory led to wild celebrations in Germany. He received congratulatory cables from the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; and also from Marlene Dietrich, by then in American exile.
A film of the fight played to packed houses in Germany. A Nazi weekly journal, Das Schwarz Korps, commented: “Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race.”
The irony was that Schmeling, who had been world heavyweight champion from 1930-32, did not support Hitler’s racial and religious persecutions. In 1935, he had blatantly defied the Führer’s order to replace Joe Jacobs, his Jewish-American trainer. He also refused to divorce his Czechoslovakian film star wife, Anny Ondra. On November 9, 1938, five months after his defeat by Louis, he sheltered two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristalnacht, when the Nazis instigated public violence against Germany’s Jews.
Born in Uckermark, in the state of Brandenburg, Schmeling was raised in Hamburg and had ambitions to be a football goalkeeper until, at the age of 14, he saw a newsreel of the US boxer Jack Dempsey. Schmeling, self-taught, developed sound skills, an iron physique and a powerful punch with either hand. He turned professional in August 1924, winning the Germany light-heavyweight title three years later and the European crown in 1928.
In pre-Nazi Berlin, one of the most glamorous, exciting cities in Europe, Schmeling was as feted by high society as was Dietrich at the height of her Blue Angel movie success. “It was a time that wanted heroes,” he remembered.
Following two successful European title defences, Schmeling moved up to heavyweight to challenge American Jack Sharkey for the world title, left vacant by the retirement of Gene Tunney. The fight was in New York on June 12, 1930; Schmeling won on a foul in round four, after a short left hook to the groin left him in agony. It was the first time the world title had been decided in such circumstances.
Schmeling beat Young Stribling on a 15th-round stoppage at Cleveland in 1931, only to lose his title on a split decision to Sharkey at Long Island on June 21, 1932, a controversial verdict that prompted an enraged Jacobs to cry: “We wuz robbed.”
Schmeling paid a high price for his defeat by Louis. He was the only top German sportsman to be drafted into the Wehrmacht. At the outbreak of war, he was called into a parachute regiment, and, in 1941, was wounded in the battle for Crete.
Having lost his property and wealth in the war, Schmeling made a comeback on his 42nd birthday, knocking out Werner Vollmer in round seven. He went on to beat Hans Joachim Dragstein, but was outpointed by Walter Neusel, whom he had stopped in 1934. His last fight was in October 1948; he was outpointed by Richard Vogt. In all, Schmeling had 70 fights, winning 53, including 39 stoppages, drawing four and losing 10. He ploughed his earnings into a farm, acquired business skills and secured a production licence from Coca-Cola.
The longest-lived world heavyweight champion, Schmeling became a successful businessman and a popular, well-respected member of Hamburg society. He avoided interviews, believing that the media had an unhealthy obsession with his distant past. He was probably the last living person to have spoken with Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Al Capone, Pope Pius XII – and Marlene Dietrich.
Three decades ago, he said he was almost happy that he had lost the great fight. “Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.” He stayed friends with Louis in later years, and even gave him financial help.
He met Anny Ondra on set while he was appearing in a film. They married in 1932, she died in 1987.
· Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling, boxer, born September 28 1905, died February 2 2005
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Amira Casar holds both Irish and French citizenship. She was born in London, grew up in Ireland at at sixteen moved to France with her parents. She worked as a model before studying acting. Her films include “Why Not Me” in 1999, “Transylvania” and “An Old Mistress”.
IMDB entry:
She worked as a model for Chanel and the fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.
Born in England and subsequently raised in England, Ireland and France, Amira Casar, studied drama at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique de Paris.
Member of the jury at the Angers First Film Festival in 2006.
Daughter of Kurdish father and a Russian opera singer.
Activities : fencing, horse-riding includes side saddle and jumping, swimming, water skiing, snow skiing, motorbike riding, martial arts, athletics.
She collaborated with the artist Sophie Calle for her Venice Biennale Installation “Prenez soin de vous”.
She played the lead role in Eleonore Faucher’s film “Gamines” in 2009. For her portrayal as Dora Maar, the surrealist artist and Picasso’s muse in “La Femme qui Pleure au Chapeau Rouge”, she won the best actress award at La Rochelle Television Film Festival.
She is fluent in both English and French, has worked in German, Italian and Spanish.
he above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Frank Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1928. He starred in Elia Kazan’s “America, America” in 1963 and “Once Upon A Time in the West” in 1968. He died in 1971 in Rome.
Ruth Leuwerik was born in 1924 in Essen, Germany. She is best known for her playing of Maria Von Trapp in the German made “The Trapp Family” in 1956 and it’s sequel “The Trapp Family in America” in 1958.
IMDB Entry:
Often called the First Lady of German cinema, Ruth Leuwerik was at the peak of her popularity during the 1950’s when partnered on screen by the leading male stars of the post-war era: Dieter Borsche, Hannes Messemer, Curd Jürgens and O.W. Fischer. She proved her range by alternating between glamorous damsels and emancipated, resilient heroines in quality productions, invariably directed by master film makers like Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Robert Siodmak or Helmut Käutner.
Young Ruth first became enamoured with acting after watching a movie with Greta Garbo at the age of ten. Julius Martin Leeuwerik, a merchant, was sufficiently prosperous to afford his daughter private acting tuition after she was initially rejected by Berlin’s premier acting academy. Undeterred, Leuwerik made her theatrical debut in 1943. The war, however, proved decidedly limiting to further career prospects. Between 1947 and 1949, she was able to gain steady theatrical engagements in Bremen and Lübeck. The following year, she came to the attention of film audiences in the vacation comedy, Dreizehn unter einem Hut (1950). Success was almost immediate and work on the stage henceforth took a back seat to the celluloid medium.
Between 1950 and 1963, Ruth Leuwerik starred in 28 pictures, nearly all of them box-office gold. These ranged from creaky melodramas like Die große Versuchung (1952) and Geliebte Feindin (1955) to prestige pictures like Rosen im Herbst (1955) (as Effie Briest, based on the novel by Theodor Fontane) and Ludwig II: Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955) (as Empress Elisabeth of Austria). Her varied roles encompassed not only the standard Mittel-European aristocratic heroines of the period, but also hardy bourgeois mothers, victims of circumstance and dedicated professional women. She played Maria von Trapp in The Trapp Family (1956) — long before the musical version with Julie Andrews was conceived — and showcased her abilities as a serious dramatic actress in the role of a priest’s daughter, on trial for murdering her husband, in the title role of A Matter of Minutes (1959). Another moving and sympathetic portrayal was that of the physician Hanna Dietrich, tending to 300 German POW’s inside a Siberian concentration camp, in the gritty post-war drama Taiga (1958). This particular performance won her the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Arguably the culmination of her career was Sweetheart of the Gods (1960), a biopic of the tragic actress _Renate Müller (I)_. Voted Germany’s most popular actress by Bravo, “the magazine for film and television”, Leuwerik also picked up four prestigious Bambi Awards in 1953, 1960, 1961 and 1962. She was the first German actress to participate in a Royal Performance in London in 1960.
From 1964 — having rejected an offer from Hollywood — Leuwerik began to withdraw from public life and restrict her appearances to occasional guest spots on television. Unlike other screen divas, her personal life was remarkably devoid of scandal and controversy. Her second husband was the famous German opera singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Ruth Leuwerik died in Munich in January 2016 at the age of 91.
