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European Actors

Collection of Classic European Actors

Lily Damita
Lili Damita
Lili Damita

Lily Damita was born in 1904 in Blaye, France.   She appeared in some German silent films in the 1920’s, some of them directed by her then husband Michael Curtiz.   In 1928 she went to Hollywood and starred in “The Rescue”, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” and “This Is the Night”.   In 1935 she married her second husband the actor Errol Flynn. They had a son together Sean Flynn.   Sean Flynn was originally an actor and them became a photographer and journalist who disappeared on assignment in Viet Nam during the conflict in 1970.   Damita funded searches for Sean Flynn to no avail.   She died in 1994 in Florida at the age oif 89.

Her “Independent” obituary by David Shipman:

Liliane Marie Madeleine Carre (Lili Damita), actress: born Blaye, France 10 July 1904; married secondly 1935 Errol Flynn (died 1959; one son deceased; marriage dissolved 1942), 1962 Allen Loomis (marriage dissolved); died Palm Beach, Florida 21 March 1994.

LILI DAMITA was a pretty, talented star actress of early talkies, though now chiefly remembered as the wife of Errol Flynn, who called her – if not to her face – ‘Tiger Lil’.

They met on a transatlantic liner in 1935. He was a bisexual adventurer hoping for a career in show- business after making a semiprofessional film in his native Australia. In Britain he had played roles with the Northampton rep, and a fleeting appearance in the West End brought the offer of the lead in a Warner Bros ‘quota quickie’, on the strength of which he was summoned to Hollywood.

Damita was born in France, started dancing professionally at 16 and made her film debut in 1922. She was trouping in Berlin with a company managed by her mother when more movies were offered, if not with significant roles – though she appeared in two made by Germany’s leading director, GW Pabst.

In 1926 she starred in The Queen was in the Parlour, by Noel Coward, filmed by Michael Balcon’s Gaumont-British in a coproduction with the renowned German studio Ufa. But her international career remained on hold till she met Sam Goldwyn in Berlin in 1928.

The advent of Pola Negri and more especially Greta Garbo had caused Hollywood to look more closely at Europe’s female stars. Audiences accepted several movie queens as vamps but, even in the era of the flapper, it was safer to have such stories set in decadent old Europe. Goldwyn had already decided to split up the team of Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky, so he cast Damita as the young wife of an elderly politician who dallies with Colman in The Rescue (1929), a so-so version of Conrad; but with the coming of talkies he feared that her accent would be as much an obstacle as Banky’s. Damita worked on it while on loan to MGM for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), based on Thornton Wilder’s novel, and was signed by Fox for her first talkie, The Cockeyed World (also 1929), as the fiery senorita fought over by Sergeant Quirt (Edmund Lowe) and Captain Flagg (Victor McLaglen).

This was a sequel to What Price Glory? (1926), when their bone of contention had been Dolores Del Rio, and it enjoyed the same phenomenal popularity. Unfortunately, Hollywood was awash with exotic beauties, partly because of Del Rio’s success, and Damita didn’t work again until Paramount cast her as a French orphan who poses as Gary Cooper’s wife in Fighting Caravans (1931) – by which time the arrival of Marlene Dietrich had renewed interest in femmes fatales. RKO made Damita the young wife attracted to a stepson of her own age in The Woman Between (1931), and in Friends and Lovers (also 1931) she was the wife of a sadistic Eric von Stroheim.

Goldwyn dropped her, partly because her frankness with the press about her millionaire lovers was of dubious value at the box-office. She later said that her contract forbade marriage, but she managed a clandestine one about this time, after announcing that she would not, after all, wed Prince Louis Ferdinand, the son of the Crown Prince of Germany.

That last relationship was used by the writers of an Edward G. Robinson vehicle, I Loved a Woman (1931). The Robinson character was a recognisable amalgam of two Chicago tycoons, and in the same vein Warners came up with The Match King (1932), with Warren William as a thinly disguised Ivar Kreuger. Damita played the temperamental German star with whom he is so besotted that he sees his fraudulent fortune disappear, only to lose her to an obscure violinist in the last reel – almost the only element of the role which was not drawn from her own life.

As movie offers ceased Damita returned to the stage, but was sacked after a few days in a musical, Here’s How (1934), supposedly because she could no longer deliver across the footlights but almost certainly because she was too demanding. She walked out of a British film on realising that her role was subsidiary to that of Gertrude Nissen, but stayed to play Jack Buchanan’s girlfriend in a remake of the old farce Brewster’s Millions (1935). It was when returning from that job that she met Flynn.

They became lovers after meeting again on the Warner tennis court and married on a whim, thus presenting the studio with a problem when he became a star overnight in Captain Blood (1935). Warners rose to the occasion and proclaimed her a tempestuous enchantress tamed by their new romantic hero – in contrast to the virginal Olivia de Havilland, his frequent leading lady. Damita was jealous of her and of Flynn’s success and his barely concealed infidelities; after she failed to re-ignite her career in France the couple settled for a life of quarrels, separations and acrimonious attempts at reconciliation.

She became pregnant and after the birth of a son began proceedings for divorce. This was made easier when Flynn was accused of statutory rape by two adolescent members of his fan club; and although he was acquitted the divorce judge awarded her half of Flynn’s property and dollars 1,500 a month. She did not remarry till after his death. Their son, Sean, was briefly an actor in the Sixties, before disappearing, permanently, while photographing the war in Vietnam.

This “Independent” overview can also be accessed online here.

Simone Silva
Simone Silva
Simone Silva

Simone Silva was born in Cairo, Egypt to French parents in 1928.   She came to Britain in the late 1940’s and virually all of her acting career was in British films.   Her first film was in 1951 in “Lady Godiva Rides Again”.   Her other films include “South of Algiers”, “The Weak and the Wicked” and “Third Party Risk”.   She died in 1957 at the age of 29 in London.

IMDB entry:

Simone Silva was born to French-Italian parents in Cairo as Simone de Bouillard. She was known mainly in England, where the great majority of her films were produced, as an actress of B-movies, who usually played supporting roles and bit parts.This mostly forgotten actress in some ways was more bright in life than in her very short career. Her tragic death was not entirely the result of natural causes. She was found dead in London’s fashionable Mayfair district after having apparently suffered a stroke likely brought on by a severe diet, as she struggled desperately to return to the screen in perfect shape.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Yuri Suassuna de Medeiros: yuri.medeiros@gmail.com

Hildegard Knef
Hildegard Knef
Hildegard Knef

Hildegard Knef was born in 1925 in Ulm in Germany.   She began studying actiong in 1940 and made some films before the fall of the Third Reich.   Her first international film was in 1951 in “Decision Before Dawn” with Oscar Werner.   She won a contract with 20th Century Fox and in Hollywood she made “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward” and “Diplomatic Courier” with Tyrone Power.   She starred on Broaway in “Silk Stockings” in 1955 and also had a successful career as a singer.   Knef was also an acclaimed writer.   She died in 2002 at the age of 76.

IMDB entry:

Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was born on December 28, 1925 in Ulm, Germany. In 1940, she began studying acting. Even before the fall of the Third Reich, she appeared in several films, but most of them were only released after the war. To avoid being raped by Soviet soldiers, she dressed like a young man and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. She escaped and returned to war-shattered Berlin where she played her first parts on stage. The first German movie after World War II, Murderers Among Us (1946), made her a star. David O. Selznick invited her to Hollywood and offered her a contract – with two conditions: Hildegard Knef should change her name into Gilda Christian and should pretend to be Austrian instead of German. She refused both and returned to Germany. In 1951, she provoked one of the greatest scandals in German film history when she appeared naked on the screen in the movie Sunderin (1951). The Roman Catholic Church protested vehemently against that film, but Hildegard just commented: “I can’t understand all that tumult – five years after Auschwitz!”

With the support of her first husband, the American Kurt Hirsch, she tried a second time to launch a Hollywood career, changed her family name from Knef to Neff (because Americans could not pronounce Knef), but the only worthwhile part she got was a supporting role in the Hemingway adaptation of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952). She became a leading lady in German, French and British films. Finally, America offered her another chance, this time on the stage. She achieved a kind of stardom as Ninotchka in the very popular Broadway play, “Silk Stockings”. In 1963, she began a new career as a singer and surprised the audience with her typical, deep, smoky voice and the fact that many lyrics of her songs were written by herself. In 1970, she wrote the autobiographical bestseller “Der Geschenkte Gaul”. She got sympathy from all over the world for her fight against cancer, which she defeated several times.

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Elke Sommer

Elke Sommer was born in 1940 in Berlin.   She came to film prominence in the early 1960’s and starred opposite the leading men of the time including Paul Newman in “The Prize” in 1963 , Peter Sellers in “A Shot in the Dark” in 1964, “The Art of Love” with Dick Van Dyke and James Garner and “The Oscar” opposite Stephen Boyd.   In the 1970’s she starred in some classic Italian horror films and in the UK starred in a “Carry On”, “Carry On Behind”.   She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

This gorgeous Teutonic temptress was one of Hollywood’s most captivating imports of the 1960s. Blonde and beautiful, Berlin-born Elke Sommer, with her trademark pouty lips, high cheekbones and sky-high bouffant hairdos, proved irresistible to American audiences, whether adorned in lace or leather, or donning lingerie or lederhosen. She was born in Berlin-Spandau on November 5, 1940 with the unlikely name of Else Schletz-Ho to a Lutheran minister and his wife. The family was forced to evacuate to Erlangen, during World War II in 1942, a small university town in the southern region of Germany. It was here that her parents first introduced her to water colors and her lifelong passion for painting was ignited. Her father’s death in 1955, when she was only 14, interrupted her education and she relocated to Great Britain, where she learned English and made ends meet as an au pair. She eventually attended college back in Germany and entertained plans to become a diplomatic translator but, instead, decided to try modeling.

After winning a beauty title (“Miss Viareggio Turistica”) while on vacation in Italy, she caught the attention of renowned film actor/director Vittorio De Sica and began performing on screen. Her debut film was in the Italian feature, Men and Noblemen(1959), which starred DeSica and was directed by Giorgio Bianchi. Following a few more Italian pictures, which included her first starring role in Love, the Italian Way (1960), also directed by Bianchi, Elke began making a name for herself in German films, as well, and gradually upgraded her status to European sex symbol. A pin-up favorite, she appeared fetchingly in both dramas and comedies, with such continental features asDaniella by Night (1961), Sweet Ecstasy (1962) and her first English-speaking picture,Why Bother to Knock (1961), to her credit.

Hollywood naturally became intrigued and she moved there in the early 1960s to try and tap into the foreign-born market. Her sexy innocence made a vivid impression in the all-star, war-themed drama, The Victors (1963), the Hitchcock-like thriller, The Prize (1963), for which she won a “Best Newcomer” Golden Globe Award, and, especially, A Shot in the Dark (1964), the classic bumbling comedy where she proved a shady and sexy foil toPeter Sellers‘ Inspector Clousseau. She grew in celebrity, which was certainly helped after showing off her physical assets, posing for spreads in Playboy Magazine. In the meantime, she was appearing opposite the hunkiest of Hollywood actors including Paul NewmanJames GarnerGlenn Ford and Stephen Boyd.

Always a diverting attraction in spy intrigue or breezy comedy, she was too often misused and setbacks began to occur when the quality of her films began to deteriorate. The tacky Hollywood entry, The Oscar (1966), the Bob Hope misfire, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966), the tired Dean Martin “Matt Helm” spy spoof, The Wrecking Crew(1968), and her title role in the tasteless Cold War comedy, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968), starring Hogan’s Heroes (1965) alumnus, Bob CraneWerner Klempererand Leon Askin, proved her undoing.

The multilingual actress, whose career took her to scores of different countries over time and benefited from speaking seven languages fluently, resorted to a number of low-budget features in Europe, including two Italian horror movies directed by Mario Bavathat have now gone on to become cult classics: Baron Blood (1972) and The Exorcist(1973) rip-off, Lisa and the Devil (1972). The latter movie actually was a guilty pleasure. “Lisa” was re-released in 1975 as “The House of Exorcism” and added more footage of a demonic Elke, Linda Blair style, spewing frogs, insects, green pea soup and a slew of cuss words! In England, she good-naturedly appeared in the “comedy” films, Percy(1971), and its equally cheeky sequel, It’s Not the Size That Counts (1974), which starred Hywel Bennett (later Leigh Lawson) as the first man to have a penis transplant(!). She also showed up in one of the later “Carry On” farces, entitled Carry on Behind (1975).

Elke fared better on television, where she appeared in the television pilot, Probe (1972), opposite Hugh O’Brian, as well as the well-made 1980s miniseries, Inside the Third Reich(1982), Jenny’s War (1985), Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986) and Peter the Great(1986). A delightful personality on the talk show circuit, the lovely Elke also made appearances as a cabaret singer and, in time, put out several albums. She found a creative outlet on stage too with such vehicles as “Irma la Douce”, “Born Yesterday”, “Cactus Flower”, “Woman of the Year” and “Same Time, Next Year”.

The veteran actress has since focused more time on book writing and painting than she has on acting. Holding her first one-woman art show at the McKenzie Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1965, her artwork bears an exceptionally strong influence to Marc Chagall and she, at one point, hosted a mid-1980s PBS series (“Painting with Elke”), that centered on her artwork, which has now exhibited and sold for more than 40 years. Nevertheless, on occasion, she tackles an acting role, often in her native Germany. Divorced from writer and journalist Joe Hyams, whom she met when he interviewed her for a Hollywood article (he recently died in November 2008), she has been married since 1993 to hotelier Wolf Walther.

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

 

Walter Slezak
Walter Slezak

Walter Slezak was born in Vienna in 1902.   His father was a famous opera singer Leo Slezak.   He acted as a leading man in German silent films.   He made his Broadway debut in 1941.   The following year he made his first Hollywood film “Once Upon A Honeymoon” with Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant.   Amonh his other films are “Sinbard the Sailor”, “The Princess and the Pirate” and “Come September”.   He died in 1983.

TCM Overview:

Romantic lead and then (due to his increasing weight) character player, discovered by Michael Curtiz in Hungary in 1922. Slezak began appearing in German films that year and moved to the US, initially as a stage actor, in 1930. His screen roles were often as heavies, notably in “This Land is Mine” (1943) and “Lifeboat” (1944). Like his father, Leo Slezak (1873-1946), he was also a gifted opera singer. Daughter Erika Slezak has appeared on daytime soaps.

Anna Maria Sandri
Anna Maria Sandri
Anna Maria Sandri

Anna Maria Sandri was born in 1936 in Rome.   Her first film was as a child in “La Morte Civile” in 1942.   She only made a few films, the best known being “The Black Tent” in 1956 with Donald Sinden and Anthony Steel.   It seems to have also been her final film to date.

Marla Landi

Marla Landi was born in Torino in Italy in 1933.   Most of her acting career was in British films.   Her film debut was in 1954 in “The Golden Link”.   Her other films include “Across the Briidge”, “Dublin Nightmare”, “The Pirates of Blood River” and “The Murder Game”.   Her most famous role was in 1959 in “The Hound of the Baskervilles” with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.   She retired from acting in 1969.   In 1977 she married Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baronet. Together they lived at West Wycombe House in Buckinghamshire.

Harriet Andersson
Harriet Andersson
Harriet Andersson

Harriet Andersson was born in 1932 in Stockholm.   She is associated with the films of the great Ingmar Bergman.   Her films with him include “Smiles of a Summer Night” in 1955, “Through a Glass Darkly”, “Cries and Whispers” and in 1972, “Fanny and Alexander”.   Her other films include “A Deadly Afffair” directed by Sidney Lumet in 1966 and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” in 2003.

TCM Overview:

A sensual, stunningly beautiful member of Ingmar Bergman’s troupe, Harriet Andersson was featured in many of the director’s early classics. Unlike other typical Swedish leading ladies, Andersson was dark-haired, but her outsider appearance was used to smoldering, even kittenish appeal. She began by performing dance halls while still a teenager and at age 18 made her screen debut in “Medan Staden Sover/While the City Sleeps” (1950). Bergman cast her two years later using her coarse but sensual appeal to good effect in “Summer with Monika” (It is a still photograph from this film that Jean-Pierre Leaud steals in Francois Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece “The 400 Blows”.) For the director, she was often the lower-class girl, as in her circus performer in “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) or her maid Petra in the comic “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955). Bergman elevated her somewhat as the schizophrenic in “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961) and the dying sister in “Cries and Whispers” (1972) but in their final screen collaboration “Fanny and Alexander” (1981) had her back as a kitchen maid.

Despite the international attention Andersson received for her work with Bergman, it was her husband Jorn Donner who offered her more substantial roles. She received a Best Actress citation from the 1964 Venice Film Festival as a married woman rediscovering the pleasures of sex and romance in Donner’s “To Love”. More recently, Andersson projected underlying rebellion as a sympathetic teacher in “Beyond the Sky” (1993).

Unlike her colleagues such as Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann who were also launched by Bergman, Andersson has made few international films. She made her English-language debut in Sidney Lumet’s “The Deadly Affair” (1966), but seemed more at ease working with her countrymen. Andersson has made a handful of Swedish TV-movies, including “I HHHavsbandet” (1971), and occasional stage appearances, including playing Anne Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 1953 and Ophelia in “Hamlet”.

Lila Kedrova
Lila Kedrova
Lila Kedrova

Lila Kedrova was born in Russia in 1918.   She joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1932.   She made many French films in the 1950’s and in 1964 she replaced Simone Signoret in “Zorba the Greek” with Anthony Quinn.   She won an Academy Award for her performance.   She went on to make “Torn Curtain” with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews directed by Alfred Hitchcock.   She won critial acclaim in 1980 for her performance with Melvyn Douglas in “Tell Me A Riddle”.   She died in Ontario, Canada in 2000 at the age of 81.

Her “Guardian” obituary:

Lila Kedrova was rumoured to be 80 when she died – she had chosen her own birth date when all paper evidence was abandoned as her family fled Russia after the Revolution: she liked to say that this allowed her to be any age she wanted. And her preferred age was 16, the age of the soubrette.

That was her gift: she played tragic soubrettes, foolish but not silly young women aged 38 and 66 and 71, still willing to believe that romance will blossom even as they recount, broken-voiced, how romance has failed them in the past.

Kedrova was 45 when director Michael Cacoyannis phoned from Crete to invite her to take over the role of Mme Hortense in Zorba the Greek, after Simone Signoret walked out on him a week into shooting. His Hollywood producers advised him to buy the biggest replacement name around, but he knew that Kedrova – whom he called Little Monster for her persistence – had yearned for the role, even though she was 20 years too young to be the consumptive whore.

He asked in French if she could speak English. “Oui,” she lied, flew forthwith from Paris to Crete, caught flu, hid in bed and learned her lines for the first scene. The whole crew, protective of her, coached her: in snagged crochet gloves, she gave the truest performance in that phoney film: her Hortense abandoned herself as totally as an adolescent to hope. Sentiment made her brave. She won an Oscar.

In 1984, by which time she was the right age and rather more – “smeary-faced, shimmery, out of a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas” wrote Frank Rich – she won a Tony for Hortense again, once more opposite Anthony Quinn, in the Broadway musical version.

Lila, short for Elizabeth, was born in whatever was the Russian equivalent of a theatre trunk. Her father was a singer, director of the Kedroff Quartet, her mother in the Petrograd Opera. Lila Kedrova studied piano (encouraged by Shostakovich, for whom she claimed she turned pages of score), her education broken by the family flight first to Germany, then Paris – at the beginning of the Stalin terror, a stranger on the street told her father he was on the list to be purged.

The Kedroffs were Bohemian refugees; Lila went barefoot; Lila was acquainted with Stravinsky and Prokofiev; Lila ran off with the gypsies and pretended to be an orphan to join the circus, pulling a “big, old, friendly” bear around the ring on a chain.

At 14, she joined the emigré Moscow Arts Theatre, a Stanislavsky-style touring company; learnt discipline singing in cafe-concert, (“Quick-quick, I change dress, make up, all”); and studied at drama school under actor-director Pierre Valide, whom she married.

 

Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

In the 50s, he directed her initial stage successes, including The Rose Tattoo. She was in A View from The Bridge, A Taste of Honey, and a drug addict in Razzia sur la Chnouf, for which she won the French critics’ best performance award in 1955, when it was made into a film.

She reluctantly took roles in European and Hollywood films – including Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and A High Wind in Jamaica – but hated to leave the stage even for a holiday. After Zorba, she could have patented the character on the movie cameo role circuit of the time, but she did not: her best performance was in Polanski’s 1976 The Tenant.

Onstage, she took the part she had always been meant to play, Lyuba Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in London in 1967: her Ranevskaya’s sense of loss at parting with the estate was overcome by excitement at rejoining her lover and frittering away the money in Paris. (During the production she had met her second husband, Canadian stage director Richard Howard.)

The next year, she was Frau Schroeder, Sally Bowles’s Berlin landlady in the London production of Cabaret, a widow romanced by a Jewish greengrocer: this time love did not make her brave. “What would you do?”, she half-growled, half whispered, and – parting pragmatically with hope – “It’ll all go on, if we’re here or not. So who cares. So what?” But when she played Gigi’s aunt at the Fortune in 1976, she seemed, for all the wisdom, younger than teenage Gigi; she was perfectly wistful as Madame Armfeld in A Little Night Music at Chichester in 1989.

Kedrova remained with Howard, based in Canada and Paris, until her death. She leaves no other family.

• Lila (Elizabeth) Kedrova, actress, born October 9 1919; died February 16 2000