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.
European Actors
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.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Madeleine Robinson was born in 1916 in Paris. She made her movie debut in 1935 in “Promesses”. Her other films include “The Royalists” in 1947, “Tuesday’s Guest” and “Alone in the World”. She died in 2004 in Lausanne Switzerland.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Despite her Anglo-Saxon-sounding name, the actor Madeleine Robinson, who has died aged 87, typified the sophistication and allure of French stars, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, she was born Madeleine Svoboda in Paris of a Czech father, a pastry chef, and French mother who was a bus conductor. She chose the name of Daniel Defoe’s castaway because “it was a synonym of liberty”. Throughout her life, she had a series of poodles that she called Vendredi (Friday). Determinedly independent, Robinson was known not only for the intensity of her performances but for her fiery temperament off stage and screen. Her confrontations with directors, and squabbles with her lovers and husbands (one of her three being the Spanish writer and actor José-Luis de Villalonga) fed the gossip columns.
She started work in a factory at the age of 14, and then worked as a messenger girl and as a maid in the house of an artist, who encouraged her to enrol for a drama course given by the celebrated director Charles Dullin in the school attached to his Thétre de l’Atelier. In 1934, aged 18, she appeared in Soldiers Without Uniform, the first of her 79 films, and it was not long before she gained substantial roles in films by the leading French directors of the day, both before the war and during the German occupation. One of the best was Jean Grémillon’s Lumiere d’Été (1943), banned by the Vichy authorities for its allegorical attack on the decadence and corruption of the ruling classes. Written by Jacques Prévert, it was set in an isolated mountain hotel where Robinson is the focal point as a naive young woman who has come to meet her dissolute fiance (Pierre Brasseur), a drunken artist. Disappointed in the soullessness of this society and disillusioned by her fiance, she is drawn to a young engineer whose values eventually inspire her to love.
In Douce (1943), directed by Claude Autant-Lara, she is far from innocent as the ambitious tutor to a young daughter of an aristocratic family with designs on marrying the head of the household. The following year, she was a young woman trapped in a dreary village, in Sortilèges (1945) by Christian-Jaque, with another poetic Prévert screenplay. Doom and gloom continued in Yves Allegret’s Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (Riptide, 1945), an archetypal fatalistic postwar French drama, which cast Robinson opposite Gérard Philipe in the role of a fugitive at a desolate seaside resort in rainy Normandy in winter.As a dishevelled chambermaid, she vainly tries to rescue him from despair.Not much joy either in Dieu A Besoin Des Hommes (1950) by Jean Delannoy, where Robinson, living on a rugged and barren island off the Brittany coast, is the fiancee rejected by Pierre Fresnay, when he decides that his calling is to become a priest.
For much of the 1950s, Robinson made films for, in her words, raisons alimentaires, but later benefited from better roles as a mature woman. Claude Chabrol astutely cast her as a neurotic wife of an adulterous wine merchant in A Double Tour (Web Of Passion, 1959), which gained her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She was also effective as Joseph K’s landlady, Frau Grubach, in Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962). Meanwhile, Robinson was enjoying a parallel stage career, especially powerful in Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; as the domineering mother in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, the foul-mouthed Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and playing Brecht’s Mother Courage. One of her last notable screen roles was as the narrow-minded mother of Isabelle Adjani, who took the title role in Camille Claudel (1988).
In 1993, Robinson retired to her house in Switzerland, garlanded with many awards including the Legion of Honour, the National Order of Merit, and Commander of Arts and Letters.· She is survived by a son; her daughter predeceased her.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Marianne Sagebrecht was born in 1945 in Bavaria, Germany. Her films include “Bagdad Cafe”, “Sugarbaby” and “War of the Roses” with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
TCM Overview:
This character player with a heart-shaped face and child-like features began her career as a leading producer and performer of Germany’s alternative theater/cabaret scene. The eclectic background of Marianne Sagebrecht included stints as a medical lab assistant and magazine assistant editor before she found her calling in show business. Claiming to be inspired by Bavaria’s mad King Ludwig II, she became known as the “mother of Munich’s sub-culture” as producer and performer of avant-garde theater and cabaret revues, particularly with her troupe Opera Curiosa. Spotted by director Percy Adlon in a 1977 production of “Adele Spitzeder” in which she essayed the role of a delicate prostitute, Sagebrecht was cast as Madame Sanchez/Mrs. Sancho Panza in Adlon’s TV special “Herr Kischott” (1979), a spin on “Don Quixote”. The director put her in his 1983 feature “The Swing” in a small role and then created the leading role of Marianne, an overweight mortician in love with a subway conductor, in “Sugarbaby” (1985) especially for her.
American films beckoned as well and Sagebrecht was often cast in roles tailored to her unique abilities. Paul Mazursky reworked the part of a Teutonic masseuse for her in “Moon Over Parador” (1988) while Danny De Vito tailored the part of the German housekeeper for a divorcing couple in “The War of the Roses” (1989). Returning to Germany, she shone as the timid maid in the 1930s who marries her Jewish employer for convenience then falls in love in “Martha and I” (1990; released in the USA in 1995). Sagebrecht headlined the black comedy as an unhappy wife whose straying husband plots her death in “Mona Must Die” (1994) and had small supporting parts in “The Ogre” (1996) and “Lost Luggage” (1998).
The above TCM overview can now be accessed online here.
Luciana Paluzzi was born in Rome in 1937. She made her film debut in 1954 in “Three Coins in the Fountain” as the younger sister of Rosanno Brazzi. She wnet on to have a career in Italian films. In the late 1950’s she began making movies in the UK and starred with Stanley Baker in 1958 and with Peter Sellers in “Carlton Browne of the F.O.” In Hollywood she starred in “Return to Peyton Place” with Jeff Chandler and “Muscle Beach Party”. Her most famous role was in the James Bond “Thunderball” in 1965 as Fiona Volpe opposite Sean Connery. She continued to have an international career for the next dozen years.
Article on 007 Wiki:
A deadly assassin in SPECTRE’s execution branch, she becomes NATO pilot Major François Derval’s mistress in order to steal a Vulcan bomber and its precious cargo of two atomic bombs, which SPECTRE plans to use for a blackmail operation.
The evening of Derval’s scheduled departure on a NATO training exercise, Volpe detains the pilot until her co-conspirators arrive and murder him; replacing him with the surgically-altered Angelo Palazzi. However, after receiving his payment from Volpe, Angelo demands more – a quarter of a million dollars. Count Lippe, the second of the three conspirators, threatens Angelo with a silenced pistol, but is instructed by the more pragmatic Volpe to put it away. She agrees to his demands to avoid further complications.
Upon successful completion of the operation, SPECTRE Head Ernst Stavro Blofeld, orders the execution of Lippe as punishment for his poor judgement in hiring the greedy Palazzi. The following morning, Volpe assassinates Lippe by destroying his car with a concealed missile launcher on her BSA Lightning A65LMotorcycle. Volpe is later seen pushing the motorcycle into a pond, presumably to hide evidence.
Later, in the Bahamas, Bond meets Volpe while hitchhiking and she startles Bond with her fast driving. It is here that 007 first notices her distinctive SPECTRE insignia ring. They arrive at their hotel in Nassau. Fiona holds Paula Caplan captive, but Caplan commits suicide by taking cyanide before revealing anything. Returning to his suite, Bond discovers Fiona in his bathtub. She gets out and the two make love. Grasping the headboard she exclaims, “Mmm… this bed feels like a cage, all these bars. Do you think I’ll be safe?”
While leaving for the Junkanoo, Bond opens the door to come face-to-face with Vargas and Janni. Slamming the door shut, he turns to find Volpe holding a gun on him. She lets them in and after belittling Bond about his ego they take him captive.”But of course, I forgot your ego, Mr. Bond. James Bond, the one where he has to make love to a woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, and turns to the side of right and virtue… but not this one!“― Volpe belittles Bond.[src]
As they sit in traffic Bond improvises a distraction by knocking an intoxicated reveler’s liquor over the car’s interior and igniting it with Volpe’s cigarette lighter. He flees the burning vehicle into the Junkanoo crowds, pursued by Volpe and her men. Shot in the ankle, Bond inadvertently leaves a blood trail which leads them to the Kiss Kiss Club, where 007 attempts to mix in with the dancers.
Volpe approaches Bond as he is dancing with another woman. Assuming Volpe is his wife, the woman abruptly leaves, and the pair begin slow-dancing. As they dance another henchmen takes aim at Bond from behind a nearby curtain. Bond notices in time and spins Volpe into the path of the bullet, piercing her spine and killing her instantly. Her henchmen flee and 007 drops Volpe’s corpse into a nearby chair, quipping to the couple sitting at the table “mind if my friend sits this one out? She’s just dead.”
The above 007 Wiki can also be accessed online here.
Marianne Koch was born in 1930 in Munich, Germany. She made her film debut in Germany in 1950 in “The Man Who Wanted to Live Twice”. In 1957 she travelled to Hollywood to join Elsa Martinelli, Julie Adams and Gia Scala in “Four Girls in Town” for Universal Studios. She did not stay in the U.S> but resumed her career in Europe. She starred with Rosanno Brazzi and June Allyson in “Interlude” and with Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars”. She retired from acting to return to study to be a medical doctor and she practised that occupation for many years.
Laurent Tierzieff was born in 1935 in Toulouse, France. He made his stage debut in 1953 in the Theatre of Babylon’s “Tous contre tous”. On film he appeared opposite Brigitte Bardot in “A couer joie”. He died in 2010 in Paris.
“Guardian” obituary:
With his emaciated but hypnotically handsome face and lithe body, the French actor Laurent Terzieff, who has died of respiratory infection aged 75, graced the stage and films for more than half a century. There was always an aura of tormented youth about Terzieff which he carried into the classic roles of his maturity such as Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV (1989) and Shakespeare’s Richard II (1991). His perfect diction and rhythmic precision made his rendering of Jean Cocteau’s narration of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in Bob Wilson’s production at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1996 particularly exciting.
Terzieff’s special talents were used by many of the great theatre producers of the day: Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Brook, Roger Planchon, Maurice Garrel, Roger Blin and André Barsacq. He also directed dozens of plays, many at the Théâtre du Lucernaire in Montparnasse. Paradoxically, given his tormented persona as an actor, he had a taste for the comedies of the American playwright Murray Schisgal, all of whose rather wacky works Terzieff staged in Paris.
“I have the image of a Dostoevskian actor, but I’m mad about Jerry Lewis,” he once remarked. He was also fond of the absurdist plays of the Briton James Saunders and the Pole Sławomir Mrozek. However, for those whose experiences of Terzieff’s acting is confined to films – he appeared in more than 70 – there is still plenty to enthuse about.
Born in Toulouse as Laurent Tchemerzine, he was the son of a Russian sculptor who emigrated to France at the end of the first world war, and a French mother, who worked in ceramics. As a youth, he was fascinated by poetry and philosophy until, at 14, he was taken to see a production of August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, directed by Blin, who became his spiritual father. Subsequently, he learned his metier as assistant stage manager, prompt and spear carrier before gaining his first stage role in 1953 in Arthur Adamov’s Tous Contre Tous (All Against All), which helped develop his taste for the theatre of the absurd.
Terzieff was given his first chance in films in Les Tricheurs (The Cheats, 1958), Marcel Carné’s bid to keep up with the youth movement. Terzieff, in a cast that included young actors such as Jacques Charrier, Pascale Petit and Jean-Paul Belmondo, stands out as a cynical existentialist. Le Monde felt that it was his “remarkable performance that brought a sense of tragedy to the film and, at moments, its grandeur”.
The following year, Terzieff appeared in two Italian films, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò, in which he played a Russian prisoner of war with whom a hardened prison guard, Susan Strasberg, falls in love; and Mauro Bolognini’s La Notte Brava (Night Heat). In the latter, he played a disillusioned young man who, with Jean-Claude Brialy and Franco Interlenghi, is on the make for money and girls.
While Terzieff was recognised as part of a new wave of actors in the early 1960s, he made three films in a row for the veteran Claude Autant-Lara, the best being Tu Ne Tueras Point (Thou Shalt Not Kill, 1961), in which he played a conscientious objector during the second world war. In contrast, he was dashing as a revolutionary in Vanina Vanini (1961), Roberto Rossellini’s high romance of the Risorgimento. He also established his avant-garde credentials in four experimental films by Garrel’s son Philippe (Terzieff had staged the Schisgal plays with his father).
He contributed his disturbing presence to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Prisonnière (Woman in Chains, 1968) as a morose loner who photographs women in poses of masochistic submission, and played Brigitte Bardot’s lover in Serge Bourguignon’s A Coeur Joie (Two Weeks in September, 1967).
Still in demand by leading European directors, Terzieff played a roguish tramp on a pilgrimage to the Spanish shrine of Santiago de Compostela in A Via Láctea (The Milky Way, 1968), Luis Buñuel’s episodic anti-clerical stance on Catholic dogma; he was a centaur in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969); he took the childlike title role in Susan Sontag’s Brother Carl (1971); and was William Prospero, reading from The Tempest and trying to solve a hotel murder in Jean-Luc Godard’s cheeky Détective (1985). His last notable film role was as a cadaverous-looking Souvarine, the Russian anarchist preaching violent action by the miners in Claude Berri’s Zola adaptation, Germinal (1993).
Terzieff continued a parallel career in the theatre, his last performance being a magnificent Philoctetes by Sophocles in Paris in 2009. Despite his image as a melancholic loner, he was often seen in the company of friends at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, also frequented by one of his idols, Jean-Paul Sartre.
“The only woman in my life”, the actress Pascale de Boysson, his companion for 40 years with whom he formed a theatre company, died in 2002.
• Laurent Terzieff (Laurent Tchemerzine), actor, born 27 June 1935; died 2 July 2010
His “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan can be found here.
Maria Schell was born in 1926 in Austria. She began her film career om the German “Dr Holl” in 1951 and during the 50’s receiuved rave reviews for a number of European movies including “”Gervaise” and “The Heart of the Matter”. She went to Hollywood in 1958 to make “The Brothers Karamazov” with Yul Brynner, “The Hanging Tree” with Gary Cooper and “Cimarron” opposite Glenn Ford in 1960. She returned to Europe and continued her career there. She was the sister of Maximilian Schell. Maria Schell died in 2005.
Her obituary by Brian Baxter in “The Guardian”:
Like many actors, Maria Schell, who has died aged 79, was enticed into English-language films by a remake of a successful European original. In her case, it was an adaptation, Angel With a Trumpet (1950), the original of which she had made two years earlier in her native Austria.
After this British revamp, she stayed on to play the daughter of film pioneer William Friese-Greene in the star-laden The Magic Box (1951), and within a decade had notched up a formidable 25 films, usually in leading roles, throughout Europe, Britain and the US.
Schell was soon in demand from major directors including Luchino Visconti, Sacha Guitry, Anthony Mann and Alexandre Astruc, winning awards for her role in Helmut Kautner’s The Last Bridge (1954) and Réné Clément’s Gervaise (1956).
In Britain she co-starred in three of the finest, if underrated, films of the period – opposite Marius Goring in So Little Time (1952), Trevor Howard in The Heart Of The Matter (1954) and Stuart Whitman in The Mark (1961).
Despite periods of ill-health and a three-year sabbatical, Schell worked steadily into the 1990s. But the early years exhausted her and audiences, who grew weary of her emotional, often tearful, characterisation of women who were decidedly non-feminist.
Internationally, she became less fashionable after several years of enormous fame, and later work was in Germany and less often in large-scale features such as The Odessa File (1974), with her devoted younger brother Maximilian.
Maria Schell was born in Vienna, growing up in a comfortably off, cultured environment that was shattered by the rise of Nazism. Her father, a Swiss playwright, and mother, an Austrian actor, fled the Anschluss, taking their children to Switzerland, where four years later Maria made her screen debut, as Gritli Schell, in the long forgotten Streibuch (1942). She did not act again until after the war, when her films included Der Engel Mit Der Posanne (1948), which took her to England.
It was So Little Time that gave her a significant role of the kind that became her trademark. She was cast as an aristocratic Belgian who falls in love with a German colonel – a member of the occupying forces. Although sympathetically directed by Compton Bennett, it proved too melancholy for postwar audiences. The Heart Of The Matter, based on Graham Greene’s masterly novel, found her again cheerlessly in love, this time with a Catholic police officer, serving in Africa.
Despite a compromised ending, it was her best work, alongside Kautner’s The Last Bridge. This Austro-Yugosla vian film won her special mention as best actress at the Cannes festival, for her intense portrayal of a German nurse, captured by Yugoslav partisans and coming to sympathise with their cause.
After a busy two years, including Guitry’s lavish Napoleon (1955), she achieved another landmark success, playing the title role in Gervaise, the fifth screen version of Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir. Her performance as the laundrymaid-turned-entrepreneur who sinks into alcoholism won her the Volpi prize at the Venice festival. However, some critics noted an over-reliance on technique in her harrowing performance.
Seemingly destined to be thwarted by love and life, she starred in Visconti’s White Nights (1957), the first of three screen versions of Dostoevsky’s bitter-sweet love story. She played Natalia, who ignores the young man besotted by her, as she daydreams about the eventual return of her handsome, though fleeting, lover.
Her depiction of despairing women reached new heights the following year when she took the lead in an adaptation of a de Maupassant story. In Astruc’s One Life (1958) she played the aristocratic Jeanne, who unwisely marries a handsome womaniser. Following his death, she is left with their son and memories of a loveless liaison. She brought customary intelligence and intensity to the film, but one harsh critic condemned this and other performances as suffused with a “cloying sweetness”.
Schell moved to the US for her fourth film of 1958, playing Grushenka in Richard Brooks’s version of The Brothers Karamazov. The role, famously coveted by Marilyn Monroe, was played in tune with the rest of the sturdy production, but it was not the equal of her western The Hanging Tree, made the following year.
Again, she played the long-suffering heroine, temporarily blinded and tended by a dedicated doctor (Gary Cooper), while at the mercy of rougher cowboys. Her vulnerable demeanour and plaintive, accented voice heightened the drama, but the characterful western proved no more popular than the epic Cimarron (1960), directed by Mann.
One of his less successful films, it miscast Schell and she looked decidedly unhappy throughout. She was better suited to the television remake of Ninotchka. But perhaps Garbo was a difficult act for anyone to follow, and it ended her brief, though busy, stint in the US.
Schell returned to Britain for one of the best, most controversial movies of her long career. The Mark starred Stuart Whitman as a seemingly reformed paedophile who starts a relationship with a widow who has a young daughter. The intrusive press and a concerned psychiatrist contribute to the tension within a sympathetic film that would be impossible to remake today.
At the end of a hectic decade, Schell reduced her schedule to a film or television movie a year. Few were of note: in The Odessa File she was content to play a character role in a lavish production. Surfacing from a welter of television roles, she was one of innumerable stars taking the Voyage Of The Damned (1976) in a well-intentioned but dull movie about the SS St Louis, in which a group of Jewish refugees were transported to apparent safety only to be refused safe haven and returned to Germany.
Like her brother Max, she never lost her commitment to the events of the war nor her interest in classic literature. Such integrity was recognised in 1977 by an award, “for her continued outstanding contribution to the German film industry over the years”.
This had little effect on her international career and, apart from television, her screen appearances were minimal. Among her better small-screen roles was Mrs Speer in Inside The Third Reich (1982). Partly as the result of ill-health, she worked only sporadically during the 90s, but she did play the matriarch in Der Clan Der Anna Voss, a six part mini-series. In 2001, her brother Max announced production of a biographical portrait, My Sister Maria, a record of her life and career. It premiered in January 2002, in their adopted home of Switzerland.
Her two marriages both ended in divorce, the last in 1988, after 22 years with Austrian actor and director Veit Relin. She is survived by a son from her first marriage and a daughter from the second.
· Maria (Margarete) Schell, actor, born January 5 1926; died April 26 2005
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
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Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
