European Actors Archives - Page 17 of 29

Laurent Terzieff

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 obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

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.

1649215 Actress Maria Schell and Husband Horst Haechler at Cannes Film Festival May 08, 1957 (b/w photo); (add.info.: Actress Maria Schell and husband Horst Haechler at Cannes film festival may 08, 1957); Photo © AGIP.

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.

Daliah Lavi was born in Palestine in 1942. She made her film debut in 1960 and her first international was “Two Weeks in Another Town” with Kirk Douglas in 1962. Three years later she was Peter O’Toole’s leading lady in “Lord Jim” and then went to Hollywood to make “The Silencers” with Dean Martin. Her last major film role was in “Catlow” with Yul Brynner in 1971. In recent years she had established herself as a very successful singer in Germany. Daliah Lavi died in 2017.

Guardian” obituary:

With the huge success of the James Bond film franchise, starting with Dr No in 1962, a plethora of spin-offs appeared throughout the 1960s. They followed the original recipe of exotic locales, an evil genius who wishes to take over the world, a laidback, oversexed super spy hero and a bevy of (mostly treacherous) beautiful women. Among the actors portraying the last of these was Daliah Lavi, who has died aged 74.

Almost all Lavi’s film career took place in that swinging decade during which she was most likely to be seen in miniskirt and kinky boots, or displaying her underwear. The multilingual Lavi (born in the British Mandate of Palestine) had already made several French, German, Italian and Hollywood films before she starred as a sexy double agent opposite Dean Martin in The Silencers (1966), the first of the “bosoms and bullets” Matt Helm series.

Continuing in the light-hearted parodic tone was The Spy With a Cold Nose (1966) – the title refers to a bulldog with a microphone implant – in which Lavi as a Russian princess slips into the bed of a British counterintelligence agent (Lionel Jeffries), something he has long dreamed of. Lavi, with her tongue firmly in her cheek, was one of the plethora of 007s in Casino Royale (1967) and, her dark hair in a high beehive, was an alluring and mysterious woman who runs a gambling house in London in the cold war thriller Nobody Runs Forever (1968). The run of spy spoofs ended with Some Girls Do (1969), in which she was a villain, opposing and attracting “Bulldog” Drummond (Richard Johnson).

She was born Daliah Lewinbuk in the village of Shavi Zion in what was to become Israel. Her Jewish parents, Reuben and Ruth, were Russian and German respectively. When Daliah was 10 years old, she met the Hollywood star Kirk Douglas, who was making The Juggler near the Lewinbuks’ village.

Discovering that she wanted to become a ballet dancer, Douglas arranged for her to get a scholarship to study ballet in Stockholm. However, after three yearsshe was advised to give up dancing because of low blood pressure. It was then that she switched her ambitions to acting, making her first screen appearance while still a teenager in Arne Mattsson’s The People of Hemso (1955), a Swedish production based on the August Strindberg novel.

She had an uncharacteristic part in Violent Summer (Un Soir Sur La Plage, 1961) as a girl found murdered on the beach after a fleeting sexual encounter. For her role as the beautiful Italian woman causing friction between a washed-up movie star (Douglas) and a temperamental newcomer (George Hamilton) in Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) – shot in Italy – Lavi won a Golden Globes award as the most promising female newcomer. One of her rare straight dramatic roles was as a young woman who brings comfort to the complex eponymous hero (Peter O’Toole) in Lord Jim (1965), Richard Brooks’s sluggish epic based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, and shot in Cambodia and Malaysia.

She is survived by her fourth husband, the businessman Charles Gans, and their three sons and daughter.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

This ravishing, raven-haired Israeli beauty was a star in Europe long before she made a dent in Hollywood in the late 60s. Along with other tasty foreign imports at the time, such as Brigitte Bardot, ‘Ursula Andress’, Elke Sommer, Ewa Aulin, Senta Berger, Rosanna Schiaffino, Shirley Eaton, Sylva Koscina, Barbara Bouchet, et al., she pursued sex symbol status via spy spoofs, erotic thrillers, tongue-in-cheek comedies and rugged adventures. In retrospect, however, she fell quite short of her pedestal amid the large crowd of sexy luminaries at the time. Born Daliah Levenbuch, she began training as a dancer and bit part actress before she abruptly halted her career to serve with the Israeli army. In the early 60s she returned to acting and began to figure in prominently with a host of French, Italian, German and English productions being offered. Daliah reached her film crest withLord Jim (1965), The Spy with a Cold Nose (1966), and the wild and wooly Bondian spoofCasino Royale (1967), which had American male audiences noticing her for the first time. Decked out in tight mini-skirts, thigh-high go-go boots and a helmet of black hair, Daliah fit in perfectly with the times, a swinging chick of the psychedelic 60s. Her last film was the very mediocre Catlow (1971) with Yul Brynner and she quickly abandoned films. Ms. Lavi pursued a singing career back in Europe with little fanfare and only recently has been glimpsed on German television in the 90s.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net

Arletty was born outside of Paris in 1898. She began her career on the Paris stage and made her first film in 1930. Her most famous movie was”Les Enfants du paradis” in 1945. Her last film was “The Longest Day” .

Her “Independent” obituary by Gilbert Adair:

In her native France the statuesquely tall, dark and minxish Arletty was known and cherished above all for her gouaille – a colloquialism defying any too precise translation but corresponding more or less to ‘backtalk’, lip or ‘sauce’. This gouaille was her fortune, and one would not have been too astonished to discover that, like Betty Grable’s legs, it had been insured by Lloyd’s at some colossal premium. For even if British moviegoers continue to associate her almost exclusively with the role of Garance, the elegant, worldly courtesan of Marcel Carne’s classic melodrama of 1945, Les Enfants du Paradis (where she is pursued by Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand and Jean-Louis Barrault before being engulfed by a carnivalesque crowd of boulevardiers at the film’s climax), she projected a rather less diaphanous image to her own countrymen, who found her both ethereal and earthy, inaccessibly lovely and eminently beddable.

Arletty was no sissy (women too, after all, can be sissies, as witness such genteel and insipid actresses as Greer Garson and Norma Shearer). She more than held her own amid satirical male banter and tended to play the kind of heroine who would succeed in keeping her feet on the ground throughout a film until either teased or forced on to tiptoe for a climactic embrace. Sex came naturally to her – or rather, she met it halfway. Her sexuality, which was healthy, extrovert and ineradicable, she wore so lightly that both she and her public appeared to take it for granted. In 1941 she played the title-role in the best of the umpteen film versions of Sardou’s play Madame Sans-Gene, as the Marseillais laundress whom Napoleon takes as his mistress, and Madame Sans-Gene (or ‘devil-may-care’) she would remain throughout her long life.

Her birth, as Leonie Bathiat, in Courbevoie, a working-class suburb of Paris, preceded by two years that of the century. At the age of 16 she had left school and gone to work in a local factory. If by nothing else, however, her ultimate vocation would seem to have been predetermined by her already exceptional beauty, and she soon gravitated to the cinema via modelling and music-hall experience. (It was for the latter that she adopted her bizarre stage-name.) Though her film career started in 1931, in a forgettable potboiler entitled Un chien qui rapporte, her first notable appearance would be in Jacques Feyder’s Pension Mimosas (1935, starring the director’s wife, Francoise Rosay); and she can also be glimpsed in a pair of feathery entertainments by Sacha Guitry: Faisons un reve (‘Let’s Dream Together’, 1936), a lovingly chiselled soap-bubble of a comedy, and the exact French equivalent of Coward’s Private Lives, Les Perles de la couronne (The Pearls of the Crown, 1937), a trilingual toast to the Entente Cordiale in which she was deliciously improbable as a dusky Abyssinian snake-charmer.

Since, unfortunately, both Feyder and Guitry had already made Galateas out of the women they married (respectively, Rosay and Jacqueline Delubac), it was not until Arletty met Carne that she was able to claim a Pygmalion of her very own. The five films on which they collaborated between 1938 and 1954 – Hotel du Nord (1938, with Annabella, Louis Jouvet and Jean-Pierre Aumont), Le Jour se leve (1939, with Jean Gabin as a sympathetic killer holed up in an attic while the police implacably close in on him), Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942, a stilted cod-medieval fantasy with Jules Berry as a Mephistophelian Devil), Les Enfants du Paradis and the belated, relatively minor, and now forgotten L’Air de Paris (1954) – have retained most of their capacity to enchant precisely because of Arletty’s sexy nonchalance.

Like a breath of air, the air, indeed, of Paris, she contrived to dispel much of the cobwebby filigree of pessimism and despair peculiar to what was then called ‘poetic realism’. And even though it was pronounced at the very height of their critical and public popularity, her unforgettably husky disgusted cri de coeur, ‘Atmosphere, atmosphere . . .’, addressed to Jouvet on the meticulously studio-reconstructed Canal St Martin bridge in Hotel du Nord, may with hindsight have sounded the joyful if premature death-knell of those often sententiously doomy melodramas in which Carne and his regular scenarist, the poet Jacques Prevert, were for so long to specialise.

A very different highlight of her pre-war period was Claude Autant-Lara’s extremely funny Fric-Frac (1930, based on the popular Boulevard comedy by Edouard Bourdet), a film whose impenetrably slangy dialogue is such that, since it cannot be translated into English, the English spectator must somehow endeavour to translate himself into French. By contrast with the icon of idealised femininity that Carne had made of her in Les Enfants du Paradis, the Arletty of Fric-Frac is an impudent, bawdy street-urchin, her gouaille very much to the fore.

Aside from a curious performance as the Lesbian in Jacqueline Audry’s sombre, self- consciously ‘existentialist’ adaptation of Sartre’s Huis Clos (No Exit, 1954) and a brief cameo in The Longest Day (1962) – her sole venture into English-language cinema – Arletty achieved little of note after the war. If she continued to be newsworthy, it was primarily by virtue of her eventful private life. An indiscreet liaison with a high-ranking officer of the Wehrmacht had tarnished her reputation during the Occupation and resulted in her serving a two-month prison sentence in the early days of the Liberation. Later, a serious accident gradually caused her to go blind.

Writing the obituary of a great film-star is ultimately as foolish and futile an exercise as writing the obituary of Lazarus. The cinema remains, and absolutely nothing in the celluloid image of Arletty, the only one most of us have ever known of her, will have been altered by her death. She is still, as she always was, one of the medium’s most ravishing, most vital, most human ghosts.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Cecile Paoli is a French actress who is well known in Britain and Ireland for her roles in such television series as “Bergerac”, “Sharpe” and “Holby City”. She had made her television debut in 1978. In 1980 she gave an excellent performance in the mini-series “Fair Stood the Wind for France”. Great to see her in “Endeavour” on TV in 201

Peter Van Eyck. TCM Overview.

Peter Van Eyck was born in Germany in 1911. In 1931 he left Germany and came eventually to New York where he worked for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. He was in Hollywood by 1943 where he made such films as “The Moon is Down”, “Five Graves to Cairo” and “Action in the North Atlantic”. Among his later films was “The Snorkel” with Betta St John and Many Miller in 1959. He died in Switzerland in 1969.

TCM Overview:
Peter van Eyck, born Götz von Eick (16 July 1911, Steinwehr, Pomerania, Germany (now Kamienny Jaz, Poland) – 15 July 1969, Männedorf bei Zürich, Switzerland), was a German-American actor. After graduating from high school he studied music. In 1931 he left Germany, living in Paris, London, Tunis, Algiers and Cuba, before settling in New York. He earned a living playing the piano in a bar, and wrote and composed for revues and cabarets. He then worked for Irving Berlin as a stage manager and production assistant, and for Orson Welles Mercury Theatre company as an assistant director. Van Eyck went to Hollywood where he found radio work with the help of Billy Wilder, who later gave him small film roles. In 1943 he took US citizenship and was drafted into the army.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

STATION SIX-SAHARA, US poster, Peter van Eyck hands on hips, Carroll Baker center, 1962 Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDSTSI EC002

He gained international recognition with a lead role in the 1953 film The Wages of Fear. He went to appear in episodes of several US TV series including The Adventures of Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In English-language films he was most often typecast as a Nazi or other unsympathetic German type, while in Germany he was a popular leading man in a wider range of films, including several appearances in the Dr. Mabuse thriller series of the 1960s. Van Eyck was married to the American actress Ruth Ford in the 1940s. With his second wife, Inge von Voris, he had two daughters, Kristina, also an actor, and Claudia.

Paula Wessley was born in Vienna in 1907. “Maskarade” in 1934 was her first major film. Her most famous role was in “Homecoming” in 1941. She died in 2000.

IMDB entry:

Wessely trained for acting at the Reinhardt Seminar and made her theatrical debut in 1924 with the Vienna Deutsches Volkstheater in a play by Sudermann. Specialising in sophisticated comedy, she became a prominent actress of the stage, appearing in Prague (1926), Salzburg, Berlin and the Vienna Burgtheater. She was permanently contracted from 1929 to 1945 by the Theater in der Josefstadt. From the 1930’s, she developed into a more serious actress, handling roles like Gretchen in “Faust” (1935) and Joan of Arc in “Die heilige Johanna” (1936), a part which she was associated with for the rest of her career. Wessely was noted for her unaffected, natural manner. She became a screen actress at the height of her theatrical fame.

The above TCM overview can be accessed online here.

Noelle Adam was born in 1933 in La Rochelle, France. She made her film debut in 1957 and then made “Beat Girl” in the UK in 1960. In the U.S. she guest starred in “The Trials of O’Brien” in 1965. She was picked by Richard Rodgers to star in the Broadway musicak “No Strings”.

IMDB entry:

Noëlle Adam was born on December 24, 1933 in La Rochelle, Charente-Maritime, France. She is an actress, known for L’homme orchestre (1970), Wild for Kicks (1960) and Neither Seen Nor Recognized (1958).

Once wed to actor Sydney Chaplin and much later became the longtime partner of actor/singer Serge Reggiani. Together for almost 20 years, they married in 2003, a year before his death.

A former ballerina, she has been dancing since age 8.

In 1962, Noelle was appearing in “No Strings” at the same time her then-husband was appearing just down the street in “Subways Are for Sleeping.”.

Cast as Jeannette, a photographer’s assistant, in the musical “No Strings,” Richard Rodgers actually had the part largely rewritten once he had seen Noelle. She had never sung before so he had her take singing lessons.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

O.W. Fischer was born in 1915 in Austria. His career was confined to European films. His one try at Hollywood did not work and he was replaced by David Niven in the film “My Man Godfrey”. In 1955 he made “Ludwig the Second”. He died in Lugano, Switzerland in 2004 at the age of 88.

IMDB Entry:

O.W. Fischer was born on April 1, 1915 in Klosterneuburg, Austria-Hungary as Otto Wilhelm Fischer. He was an actor and director, known for Ludwig II: Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955), Helden (1958) and Ich suche dich (1956). He was married to Anna Usell. He died on January 29, 2004 in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland. Began his career with Max Reinhardt‘s stage compais breakthrough in Hollywood failed, although he was signed to star with June Allyson in My Man Godfrey (1957). When he reportedly lost his memory during filming, he was replaced by David NivenBeing one half of German cinema’s dream couple with Maria Schell in the 1950s, he became the best paid actor in Germany at that time. Moved to Vernate, Switzerland with his wife Anna in the 1960s. Ensemble member at the famous Vienna Burgtheater from 1945 to 1952. Retired from acting to lecture and publish books on linguistics and philosophy in the early 1970s. Was a member of the ensemble of the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna from 1938 to 1945, and of the Burgtheater from 1945 to 1952. He was notorious for mumbling in many of his films. It has also been stated that he seemed incapable of suppressing a certain amount of narcissism and arrogance. A popular leading actor of German films and international co-productions in the 1950’s and 60’s. He appeared opposite all the leading female stars of the period, usually as the handsome bon vivant or likeable rogue. O.W. Fischer experienced an enormous popularity jump in the 50’s once more. He played himself to the top of the German actor guild again.From the middle of the 60’s he also made movies in Italy and Spain besides Germany. This was also the time when he retired from the film business gradually. He only appeared occasionally in TV productions from the 70’s. He got first engagements at the Theater in der Josefstadt and at the Münchner Kammerspiele. From 1938 to 1944 he belonged to the company of the Deutsches Volkstheater Wien where he was also convincing in character roles.

Collection of Classic European Actors

Laurent Terzieff

Maria Schell

Maria Schell obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

Daliah Lavi

Arletty

Cecile Paoli

Peter Van Eyck

Peter Van Eyck. TCM Overview.

Paula Wessley

Noelle Adam

O.W. Fischer

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