European Actors Archives - Page 27 of 29

Nadia Gray

Nadia Gray was born in 1923 in Bucharest, Romania. Her film debut came with “L’inconniu d’un soir” in 1949. “The Spider and the Fly” was her breakthrough film and she went on to an international career. “Maniac” in 1963 with Kerwin Mathews was an intriguing mystery set in the Camargue in France. “Two for the Road” also set in France starred Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Gray was a sophiscated woman that Hepburn and Finney meet on their travels. In the late 60’s she met her husband an American lawyer and settled with him in New York. Nadia Gray died in 1994 at the age of seventy.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

Born Nadia Kujnir-Herescu in Bucharest, Romania, on November 23, 1923, to a Russian father and a Bessarabian mother, the future actress Nadia Gray was raised there. She met first husband Constantin Cantacuzino (1905-1958), a Romanian aviator and noted WWII fighter ace, while she was a passenger on one of his commercial air flights. She couple fled the country during the Communist takeover of Romania in the late 1940s and emigrated to Paris. There Nadia enjoyed a vast international career as a Cosmopolitan lead and second lead on stage and in films. The couple eventually settled in Spain.

She made her film debut in a leading role as a young waitress who yearns to be a star in the French-Austrian co-production of L’inconnu d’un soir (1949) and went on to essay a number of more mature, sophisticated, glamorous patricians in European films, often a continental jetsetter or bourgeoisie type. Earlier roles that led to European stardom included her countess in Monsignor (1949), the woman in love with a thief in The Spider and the Fly (1949), and the role of Cristina Versini in the Italian technicolor biopic of the composer _Puccini (1952)_. Her roster of continental male co-stars went on to include such legendary stalwarts as Marcello Mastroianni, ‘Vittorio de Sica’, Rossano Brazzi, Errol Flynn, Maurice Ronet and Gabriele Ferzetti. Among her scattered appearances in English-speaking productions were a mixture of adventures, dramas, comedies and horrors including Valley of the Eagles (1951) with John McCallum and Jack Warner, Night Without Stars (1951) opposite David Farrar, The Captain’s Table (1959) starring John Gregson andDonald Sinden, I Like Money (1961) starring Peter Sellers, Maniac (1963) co-starringKerwin Mathews, The Naked Runner (1967) starring Frank Sinatra and a supporting role in the classic Albert Finney/Audrey Hepburn romance Two for the Road (1967). Nadia is most famous, however, for her cameo role toward the end of Federico Fellini‘s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960) as a bored and wealthy socialite who celebrates her divorce by performing a memorable mink-coated striptease during a jaded party sequence in her home.

Following the death of her first husband in Spain in 1958 (he was only 52), Nadia continued to film and settled permanently in America in the late 60s after meeting and marrying second husband Herbert Silverman, a New York lawyer. She retired from films completely in 1976 and began headlining as a singing cabaret star. The trend-setting Russian-Romanian beauty died of a stroke in Manhattan on June 13, 1994 at age 70 and was survived by her second husband and two stepchildren.

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

“The New York Times” obituary is here.

Lil Dagover was born in Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1887. At the age of ten, she was sent back to Europe to continue her education in Germany and Switzerland. She made her silent screen debut in 1913. By the early 1920’s she was one of the most prominent actresses of the Weimar Republic. In 1932 she went to Hollywood to make “The Woman from Monte Cristo” with Walter Huston. She returned to Germany and made films there through the 30’s and right through World War Two. Towards the end of her career she made two films directed by the Austrian actor Maximillian Schell. “The Pedestrian” also starred such venerable actresses as Peggy Ashcroft, Elisabeth Bergner and Francoise Rosay. “The End of the Game” starred Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland and Jacqueline Bisset. She died in 1980 in Munich at the age of 92. Her “Wikipedia” page is here.

Laya Raki was born in 1927 in Hamburg, Germany. Her parents were circus performers. Her first film in her native country was “Council of the Gods”. In 1954 she was given a contact in Britain by J. Arthur Rank and made “The Seekers” with Jack Hawkins and Glynis Johns in New Zealand. She starred in the television series “Crane ” opposite Patrick Allen in the title role. She was long married to the Australian actor Ron Randall. “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” page is here.

“Wikipedia” entry:

Laya Raki was born in Hamburg, Germany,^[1] to acrobat Maria Althoff, and her partner, acrobat and clown Wilhelm Jörns. As she was an admirer of the famous dancer La Jana and liked to drink raki, she assumed the stage name Laya Raki.

The film company DEFA engaged her for a small role as a dancer in the film The Council of the Gods, which won two awards. One newspaper, the Berliner Morgenpost, wrote that she was a great dancer with an expressive face rich in nuances. In the same year the press department of Realfilm presented her as a new discovery in Die Dritte von rechts (“The Third from the Right”), a rather boring dance film, the highlight of which was the scene in which the scantily clad dancer Laya Raki (with only two white stars on her nipples) exposes herself to the lustful gazes of the male cinema audience. In 1953, she danced in the film Ehe für eine Nacht (“Marriage for One Night”). Her next film was Die Rose von Stambul (“The Rose of Stamboul”), in which the Austrian actor Paul Hörbiger wants to marry her upon seeing her dancing. In Roter Mohn (“Red Poppy”) she played the gypsy girl Ilonka who also conducted refreshing dialogues with the famous Viennese comic actor Hans Moser.he attracted attention for the first time in 1947–1950 as a dancer in Frankfurt and other German cities.

In 1954, she was lured to London by empty promises of film roles in the United Kingdom and in Hollywood. There she found herself unemployed, but her situation made headlines that opened opportunities. The J. Arthur Rank Film Company, which needed a slightly exotic type for a film in New Zealand, received her with open arms. She was given the role of the Māori chieftain’s seductive wife in “The Seekers” and created a worldwide stir by baring her breasts, 10 years before Rudi Gernreich‘s topless swimsuit. After having taken acting lessons in Hollywood, she appeared in several UK TV productions, including 39 episodes of the popular series Crane (1962–1965), which made her a well known actress. In it Laya Raki starred as Halima, a Moroccan dancer and bartender, who is the partner of the title character, the bar owner and smuggler Richard Crane, played by Patrick Allen.

She appeared in revealing outfits in film and photographs, and captured men’s attention like no other German showgirl in the 1950s. She modeled for postcards, pin-up photographs and magazines all over the world. The Broadway columnist Earl Wilson noted her preference for scanty clothing: “You should have seen Laya Raki. Even if she is dressed, she looks like, as if she only wears the zipper and has forgotten the material”. Of course he placed some photos of her in “Earl Wilson’s Album of Showgirls (1st Issue! 1956)”.

The above “Wikipedia” entry can also be accessed online here.

Actress Laya Raki with husband Ron Randell attend the world premiere of Zulu, which was held at the Plaza Theatre in London. The premiere was in aid of the Benevolent Funds of the Regiments of Wales and the Army Benevolent Fund. (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)

2018

Laya Raki Randell-Wood passed away peacefully in the evening of December 21, 2018, in Hollywood, California.

She was born Brunhilde Marie Jorns in Hamburg, Germany on July 27, 1927. Her mother left when Laya was only five years old. Her father remarried soon thereafter. He worked with the circus, where Laya learned acrobatics at a very young age, and performed in several circus acts. In her late teens, she partnered with fellow acrobat, Ricardo U. Partnerin, performing a 2-person dance/acrobatic act.

From there, she learned ballet and other forms of dance. She developed a passion for dance, and was best known for her exotic dances. She performed throughout NW Europe and Italy in the 1940’s to 1950. She adopted the screen name, ‘Laya Raki’, at the suggestion of her manager. In 1954, she got a major part in the movie, ‘The Seekers’, (released in the U.S. as, ‘Land of Fury’), as the exotic Moari dancer, longside actor Jack Hawkins. It was shot in New Zealand, and was a big hit, bringing Laya into the spotlight.

In 1955 Laya went to London to continue her acting career. Her roles in British films and TV productions made her an international star. She gained fame and recognition for her role in the popular British TV series, ‘Crane’. In order to appear more exotic to her viewing public, she invented a story that her mother was of Indonesian/French descent. While working in London, she met a handsome Australian actor, Ron Randell. It was love at first sight. They married in September, 1957 in London. Ron was doing films in both Australia and the United States. They decided to move to the U.S. in the 1960’s, working between New York City and Los Angeles. Laya appeared in the popular TV series, ‘I Spy’, and other shows over the years in Los Angeles.

Ron, died from Alzheimer’s related problems in June of 2005. In April of 2009, Laya married Duane Wood, retired Vice President of Lockheed Aircraft International. Laya is preceded in death by her father, Wilhelm Jorns in 1963, and her brother Alvin, her first husband, Ron Randell, and second husband Duane Wood in July of 2018. She is survived by her step-daughter, Cathy, and her step-grandchildren, Tyler and Shannon.

She will be laid to rest beside her first husband, Ronald Randell, at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park.

Sonja Henie was born in 1912 in Oslo, Norway to a very wealthy family. From an early age she practiced ice skating and she was a competitor in the 1924 Winter Olympics at the age of eleven. She won her third Olympic title at he 1936 Games. After the Games she became a professional ice skater. While performing in Los Angeles she was signed to a contract by 20th Century Fox. Her first film was “One in a Million”. The peak of her cinema career was between 1936 and 1943 and her films included “Thin Ice”, “Happy Landings”, “Sun Valley Serenade”, “Iceland” and “Wintertime”. She was a hugely popular star and made ice skating also popular. Ten years later Esther Williams was to do the same thing with swimming. Sonja Henie concentrated on ice skating revues after her film career waned. She retired from ice skating in 1956. She invested wisely and was a very wealthy woman when she died while en route by place to Oslo in 1969 at the age of 57.

TCM Overview:

Winner of the Olympic Gold medal in figure skating an impressive three times in a row (1928, 1932, 1936), Henie came to Twentieth Century-Fox shortly after her last win and was built up as a popular star. Nearly a dozen light musical comedies offered the blonde and dimpled Henie plenty of opportunities to don her blades and perform in lavish ice ballets while her leading men beamed and a cast of supporting comics clowned around. When her film career petered out in the mid-1940s she turned to performing in live ice shows.

“Vanity Fair” article on Sonja Henie can be accessed here.

Madys Christians was born in Vienna, Austria in 1892. She made her first film “The Black Hussar” in Germany in 1932. In Hollywood four years later she starred in “Come and Get It” with Frances Farmer. On Broadway she had an enourmous success with “I Remember Mama” in 1944. On film she had fine roles in 1948 in “All My Sons” and “A Letter to an Unknown Woman” which was directed by Max Ophuls. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and died in 1951.

From All Movie Guide: Primarily an actress of the European and American stage, she also appeared in many German and Hollywood films. Christians came to the U.S. in 1912 to appear with her parents in a German-speaking theater they established in New York. After making one film in the States, Audrey (1916), she returned to Germany to study with Max Reinhardt. In the ’20s she starred in numerous German plays and films, plus a few Broadway productions. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, she returned to America for good, shuttling between Hollywood and Broadway. In films she tended to play supporting character parts, while on stage she continued to find lead roles. Late in her career she was blacklisted after being labeled a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy-era “witch trials.” ~ Rovi

Jean-Marc Barr TCM Overview

Jean-Marc Barr was born in 1960 in Germany. His father was American and served in the military in the Second World War. He began working in theatre in France in 1986. John Boorman cast him in “Hope and Glory” with Sarah Miles the following year. Then he had amajor role in the very succesful “The Big Blue”. He has made several films with the Danish director Lars von Trier including “Europa”, “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogsville”. 2013 interview with Jean-Marc Barr here.

TCM Overview:

Extraordinarily handsome, classically trained actor who made his film debut as Absalom in Bruce Beresford’s 1985 biblical bomb, “King David.” Fluent in several languages, Barr earned his first leading role as champion diver Jacques Mayol in Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue” (1988), a huge hit in France which failed to find an international audience.

He enjoyed more success on the arthouse circuit with his fine work as the hapless hero of Lars von Trier’s stunning WWII film, “Zentropa” (1991). Barr also did well as an American scholar who travels to Tahiti to do research on Gaugin and forms an odd relationship with an amiable con man in “The Imposters” (1994), and reteamed with von Trier for the striking epic romance “Breaking the Waves” (1996).

Daily Telegraph obituary in 2016.

Michèle Morgan, who has died aged 96, was one of France’s top film stars of the 1940s and 1950s; said to have the most beautiful eyes in cinema, her career might have been still more stellar had a studio wrangle not caused her to lose the lead in Casbalanca to Ingrid Bergman,

She shot to fame at 17 with her first important role in Gribouille (1937) as a young woman on trial for murdering her lover. Its impact was such that RKO offered her a Hollywood contract but Morgan preferred to stay in France. Marcel Carné’s proto-noir Le Quai de Brumes created even more of a stir the next year, pairing runaway waif Morgan, in a beret and trenchcoat, opposite Jean Gabin’s deserter.

“You know you have beautiful eyes,” he says. “Kiss me,” she replies. By the time of Remorques (1940), she and the newly-divorced Gabin were an item on and off-screen and they left for America together after the German invasion. There he left Michèle Morgan for Marlene Dietrich and she discovered that RKO did not know what to do with her.

“Hollywood crushed my personality,” she said later. “They tried to make me look like everybody else – and then they photographed me badly.” Yet even so her clear blue, Garboesque gaze had got her noticed. Hitchcock wanted her for Suspicion but her poor English counted against her (“I said ‘crying trees’ for ‘weeping willows’”). She was also first choice for Ilsa Lund in Casablanca but Warners refused to pay the loan fee that RKO demanded.

She did get to star with Bogart in the forgettable Passport to Marseille (1944) and in Frank Sinatra’s acting debut, Higher and Higher. In 1942, she married another singer-turned-actor, William Marshall, but when they separated after only a few years she returned to France with their son.

Marshall later married Ginger Rogers. Meanwhile in 1946, Michèle Morgan re-established her réclame by being named best actress at the first Cannes Film Festival for her role as a blind orphan in La symphonie pastorale. She also featured as the girlfriend of butler Ralph Richardson in Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948).

Two decades later, the French-style farmhouse house that she and Marshall had built in Los Angeles was the site of the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, and four others by members of Charles Manson’s gang.

The eldest of four, Michèle Morgan was born Simone Renée Roussel at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, on February 29 1920. Her father was a perfume company executive but the crash of 1929 ruined him and the family moved to Dieppe. There he opened a grocer’s. This soon failed and at 15 Simone ran away to Paris to live with her grandparents. They paid for acting lessons and she changed her name in 1937, saying she did not have the body of a Simone.

She was at the peak of her fame in the 1950s, and was 10 times voted France’s most popular actress. She played a series of historical heroines – Joan of Arc, Josephine Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette – before showing towards the end of the decade in Marguerite de la Nuit and The Mirror has Two Faces that she could portray darker figures.

The advent of the New Wave largely ended her career and she concentrated thereafter on painting and briefly on a tie-making business. Her last role of note was in Claude Lelouch’s Cat and Mouse.

“I have never had the opportunity to play sexy women,” she reflected. “I must believe that my charm was not in my arse.”

She was predeceased by her third husband, the director Gérard Oury, and by her son.

Michèle Morgan, born February 29 1920, died December 20 2016

Michèle Morgan dans une robe de Lanvin-Castillo

Milly Vitale was a very pretty actress who was born in Rome in 1933. Her first film was “The Brothers Karamazov” in 1947. She was featured in a number of Italian films when she was given the role of Kirk Douglas’s leading lady in “The Juggler” in 1953. Two years later she was brought to Hollywood to star opposite Bob Hope in “The Seven Little Foys”. She only made the one film in the U.S. and then returned to Europe. She was in the epic “War and Peace”. She was excellent as the World War Two freedom fighter in “The Battle of the V.I.” with Michael Rennie and Patricia Medina. She retired from acting in the 1970’s. Milly Vitale died in 2006. Her link on “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.

“Wikipedia entry:

Camilla “Milly” Vitale (16 July 1933, Rome, Italy – 2 November 2006, Rome, Italy) was an Italian actress. She was the daughter of conductor Riccardo Vitale and choreographer Natasha Shidlowski.

She appeared in numerous post-war Italian films. She appeared in a few Hollywood movies but never achieved star status like her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. In her most notable U.S. role, she appeared with Bob Hope as “Madeleine Morundo Foy” in The Seven Little Foys (1956). War and Peace She married Vincent Hillyer, a United States citizen, in 1960; the marriage produced two sons, Edoardo and Vincent Jr. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. Vitale retired from acting in the 1970s, after a career of more than 47 films.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Gerard Blain was born in Paris in 1930. His first film was “Les Mstons” in 1957. He wnet on to make “Les Cousins” in 1959. Three years later he attempted an international career with “Hatari” with John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli. However he did not have an international career and he was soon back in French movies. In his last film he played a priest in “Love Bandits”. Gerard Blain died in 2000.

Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:

For those who believe that the French New Wave was as seismic an event in cinema as the coming of sound, Gérard Blain, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a key figure. In fact, one could say that he was the first face of the New Wave.

The face was young, handsome and sensitive. The short-statured Blain resembled James Dean in looks and persona, and became the favourite of young critics on the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, who decided, in their battle against the “cinéma du papa”, to make films themselves.

François Truffaut chose Blain and his wife, Bernadette Lafont, to play young lovers in the director’s first professional film, Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers, 1957). In this charming short, shot rapidly in Nmes one summer, Blain and Lafont obsess a group of pubescent boys, who spy on their lovemaking in the fields.

Blain was also in one of Jean-Luc Godard’s first shorts, Charlotte et Son Jules (1958), and was picked to play the title role in arguably the very first New Wave feature, Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1959). In it, theology student Jean-Claude Brialy (another iconic actor of the period) returns to his native village to find that his talented childhood friend, Blain, has become a hopeless drunk and is estranged from his pregnant wife (Lafont). Blain, in his first leading role, brilliantly expressed the pain of the disappointed character.

Chabrol cast the same two male leads in his second feature, Les Cousins (1959), a riveting and perverse study of decadent Parisian student life. Blain was perfect as the simple, good-hearted country cousin who comes to study at the Sorbonne, while staying at the luxury apartment of his cynical cousin (Brialy).

Blain, who was abandoned as a child by his stable-lad father, was born in Paris. He had been an extra in a few films before director Julien Duvivier discovered the 25-year-old standing at the bar of a cafe in the Champs-Elysées, and gave him a role in Voici Les Temps Des Assassins (1955), starring the great Jean Gabin.

After the two Chabrol features, Blain starred in a number of Italian films, de rigueur for many actors of the 1960s, notably Carlo Lizzani’s The Hunchback Of Rome (1960). He also appeared in the gossip columns because of his stormy marriage and divorce from Bernadette Lafont.

When making Les Mistons, Truffaut noted: “Gérard is, I think, very unhappy. He bellyaches because I prefer Bernadette in high heels; he has a Toulouse-Lautrec complex. And then he’s come to realise that Bernadette is completely at home in front of the camera, and he makes a scene every day.”

Actually, Blain never felt completely at ease as an actor, and hankered to direct, although he had to wait some years before he could do so. In the meanwhile, he was part of the international cast of Howard Hawks’s Hatari! (1962), about a group of African hunters, led by John Wayne, who catch animals for zoos. Blain was one of a number of leading French actors in the boulevard comedy La Bonne Soupe (1963), and played a resistance fighter who refuses to execute a traitor in Costa-Gavras’s Shock Troops (1968).

Blain, whose idols were the ascetic Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, directed the first of eight films, Les Amis, in 1970. Labelled Bressonian, his pictures were uncompromising studies of domestic crises, often seen from the child’s point of view, which led critics to suspect they were autobiographical. Generally, critics were favourable to him, but the films seldom made money and had distribution problems.

The fact that Blain was a difficult man to work with, and refused to compromise his principles, did not help matters. There was also his ambiguous friendship with members of the National Front, which cast a shadow over Pierre et Djemila (1987), a film which seemed anti-Arab, although the screenplay was written by Mohamed Bouchibi, formerly of the FLN.

Blain, who remarried and had two sons, found his last years particularly difficult. Faced with illness and debt, he still managed to work, and his final film, Ainsi-soit-il (So Be It, 1999), could be seen as a chronicle of his death foretold.

• Gérard Blain, actor and director, born October 23 1930; died December 17 2000

“The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.

Collection of Classic European Actors

Nadia Gray

Lil Dagover

Laya Raki

2018

Laya Raki Randell-Wood passed away peacefully in the evening of December 21, 2018, in Hollywood, California.

Sonja Henie

Madys Christians

Jean-Marc Barr

Jean-Marc Barr TCM Overview

Michele Morgan

Daily Telegraph obituary in 2016.

Milly Vitale

Gerard Blain

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