European Actors
Magda Schneider was born in 1909 in Bavaria, Germany. She made her stage debut in Munich. In 1937 she married Austrian actor Wolf Albach-Retty . The following year she gave birth to her daughter Romy Schneider. She made her film debut in 1932 in “Tell Me Tonight”. In 1953 she made the film “When the White Lilacs Bloom Again”. She supported her daughter when Romy made the “Sissi” trilogy. Magda Schneider died in 1996. Magda Schneider’s obituary in “The New York Times” here.
Martine Carol was born in 1920 in France. Her first film role was in 1943. She was a famous French film symbol of her day, predating Brigitte Bardot by a few years. Her most famous role is the title role “Lola Montes£ directed by Max Ophuls in 1955. Another of her films was “Action oif the Tiger” with Van JOhnson and a young Sean Connery. Martine Carol died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1967.
Martine Carol’s minibiography on the IMDB website:
France’s major sex siren of the early 50s, this lesser-remembered post-war French pastry pre-dated bombshell Brigitte Bardot by a few years but her brief reign did not compare and has not lived up to the Bardot era. The cult mystique is not there even after dying mysteriously and relatively young. Martine was born Marie-Louise Mourer on May 16, 1920 (some references indicate 1922), but little is known of her childhood. A chance meeting with comedian Andre Luguet steered her toward a career in the theatre. Trained by Rene Simon, she made her 1940 stage debut with “Phedre” billed as Maryse Arley. She subsequently caught the eye of Henri-Georges Clouzot who hired her for his film “The Cat,” based on the novel by Colette, but the project was scrapped. Nevertheless, she did attract attention in the movie Wolf Farm (1943), which takes advantage of her photogenic beauty and ease in front of the camera despite a limited acting ability. A pin-up goddess and support actress throughout the 40s, Martine also appeared on the stage of the Theater of the Renaissance. A torrid affair with actor Georges Marchal, who was married to actress Dany Robin at the time, ended disasterously and she attempted suicide by taking an alcohol/drug overdose and throwing herself into the Seine River. She was saved by a taxi driver who accompanied her there. Ironically, the unhappy details surrounding her suicide attempt renewed the fascination audiences had with Martine up until that time. In 1950 she scored her first huge film success with the French Revolution epic Caroline Cherie (no doubt prompted by her seminude scenes and taunting, kittenish sexuality) and she was off and running at the box office. Her film romps were typically done tastefully with an erotic twinge of innocence and gentle sexuality plus an occasional bubble bath thrown in as male bait. She continued spectacularly with an array of costumed teasers such as Adorable Creatures (1952), Sins of the Borgias (1953), Madame du Barry (1954) and Nana (1954), all guided and directed by second husband Christian-Jacque, whom she married in 1954. A true feast for the eyes and one of the most beautiful actresses of her time, Martine later divorced the director due to professional conflicts and long separations. One last memorable part would come to her as the title role in Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955) portraying a circus performer who entrances all around her. By the mid 50s, Bardot had replaced Martine on the goddess pedestal and the voluptuous blonde’s career went into a severe decline. Although such mature roles as Empress Josephine in The Battle of Austerlitz (1960) and others followed, nothing revived audience interest. Depressed, Martine turned alarmingly reclusive while a third marriage to French doctor Andre Rouveix also soured by 1962. Problems with substance abuse and a severe accident in the 60s also curtailed her career dramatically. Her last film Hell Is Empty was made in 1963 but not released until 1967. One last marriage to fourth husband Mike Eland, an English businessman and friend of first hubby Steve Crane, seemed hopeful, but on February 6, 1967, Martine died of cardiac arrest at age 46 in the bathroom of a hotel in Monacco Her husband discovered her. She was buried in the cemetery of Cannes.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
This minibiography can also be accessed online at IMDB here.
The amazine Luise Rainer is still going strong at 100 years old. She recently flew from her home in London to Los Angeles for a TCM celebration of her work on film. Her career in Hollywood was very brief but within that time in the 1930’s, she won two back-to-back Oscars, the only actress to have achieved this distinction. She was born in 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany. She began her acting career under the tutalege of Max Reinhardt in Vienna and was spotted there by an MGM talent scout and brought to Hollywood in 1936. Her two Oscars were for “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Good Earth”. However she was very unhappy in Hollywood and by 1940 she had moved to New York. She subsequently moved to London. She made intermittent film and television appearances over the years. Gradually film writers became aware that she was one of the last surviving stars of the Golden Era and she has become much sought after as a witty, interesting interviewee. Luise Rainer died at the age of 104 in December 2014.
This article by Kate Webb in “Culture” in “Aljazeera America”can also be accessed online here.
Her “Guardian” obituary by Ronald Bergan:
There are very few actors whose culture and friendships ranged so widely, and who knew so many of the great names of the 20th century, as Luise Rainer, who has died aged 104. She was married for three tempestuous years to the radical American playwright Clifford Odets; she was a key member of Max Reinhardt’s theatre company; she was the lover of the German expressionist playwright Ernst Toller; Bertolt Brecht wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle for her. She is frequently mentioned in the diaries of the writer Anaïs Nin, who was fascinated by her; she was an intimate of Erich Maria Remarque and Albert Einstein; Federico Fellinibegged her to be in La Dolce Vita; and George Gershwin gave her a first edition of the score of Porgy and Bess, with a fulsome dedication to her from the composer.
In addition, Rainer was the first movie star to win a best actress Oscar in successive years, the first for The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and the second for The Good Earth (1937). And yet, she lived the latter part of her life in comparative obscurity in London, under the name Mrs Knittel.
Rainer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, of well-to-do parents: Heinz Rainer, a German-American businessman, and his wife Emmy (nee Königsberger), a pianist from an upper-class German-Jewish family. Luise, who had dark, expressive eyes in a mobile, wistful face topped by a mass of shiny black hair, was her father’sAugapfel, the apple of his eye. However, she also experienced what she described as his “tyrannical possessiveness”.
Feeling lost and out of place in an “average bourgeois surrounding”, she sought solace in the arts: “I was always very rebellious. I felt constricted. My rebellion was against the superficial. My wealthy parents were both immensely musical and cultured, but my father wanted me to marry and have children.” At 16, she made up her mind to go on the stage. “I became an actress only because I had quickly to find some vent for the emotion that inside of me went around and around, never stopping. I would have been happy instead of turning to the stage, to write, to paint, to dance, or, like my mother, to play the piano beautifully.”
Behind closed doors, she studied the part of Lulu in Pandora’s Box by Frank Wedekind. After she auditioned at the theatre in Düsseldorf, no one could believe that she had had no previous training. “I could feel the warmth and the love coming to me from the audience and yet I could remain at a protective distance. It was what I needed.”
Her parents refused to see her act, and were horrified when she took the leading role in Wedekind’s then-shocking Spring Awakening. Thereafter she appeared in a number of productions, many with Reinhardt’s company, including Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, for which she was praised personally by the playwright. A newspaper dubbed her “the wunderkind of drama”. At the time, Toller was in love with her. “He was nothing to me but a man. I was in my teens, and his fame didn’t mean anything to me. But I had no room for him in my life because there were so many other men in love with me at the time.”
An MGM talent scout saw Rainer performing in a Viennese production of An American Tragedy in 1934, and she was immediately signed to a seven-year contract as the studio’s secret weapon to keep Greta Garbo in line. So, in 1935, in her late teens, speaking fluent French and German, but little English, Rainer arrived in Hollywood. Her first film for the studio, the spy drama Escapade (1935), in which she replaced Myrna Loy as a Viennese girl opposite William Powell, made her a star.
Her new-found status triggered her first clash with the studio boss Louis B Mayer. He wanted to loan her to 20th Century-Fox to co-star with Ronald Colman in The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Rainer talked him into giving her a much smaller role in the new Powell picture. “There’s this little scene I think I can do something with,” she told him. This “little scene” – which Mayer ordered out after the first previews but later restored – was the short, poignant telephone scene from The Great Ziegfeld. “I wrote the scene myself,” Rainer stated, “though I stole it from Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine.” As Anna Held, she telephones her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld to congratulate him on his marriage. It was enough to sway the voters of the Academy and it also established Rainer as an expert exponent of the laughter-through-tears school of acting.
The following year, Rainer made an exceptional jump to the role of the downtrodden Chinese peasant woman O-Lan in The Good Earth, based on Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel. She works silently in the fields with her husband, bears his children, begs for food during the famine, and dies quietly years later when the family has achieved some prosperity. When it was shown to the Chinese government, Madame Chiang Kai-shek reportedly could not believe Rainer was not herself Chinese, and Buck later wrote: “I was much moved by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer … marvelling at the miracle of her understanding.”
But so convinced was Rainer that she had no chance of winning the coveted Oscar for the second year running that on the night of the ceremony she stayed at home in her pyjamas. At 8.35pm, the names of the winners were given to the press, and a member of the Academy telephoned her to tell her she had won. She had to change quickly into evening dress and dash across town with Odets, whom she had married the previous year, to receive her second statuette. That night, she recalled, she and Odets were having a terrific row. She was in tears by the time they got to the Biltmore hotel, and they had to walk around the building five times before she had calmed down sufficiently to go in and accept the award.
Rainer never made big money in Hollywood. She had opportunities to increase her salary, but was disinclined to accept the method of negotiation offered by Mayer. The mogul said to her: “Why don’t you sit on my lap when we’re discussing your contract, the way the other girls do?” The fiery Rainer told him to throw her contract in the bin. “We made you and we’re going to kill your career,” Mayer roared. She replied: “Mr Mayer, I was already a star on the stage before I came here. Besides, God made me, not you!”
Thereafter her films were mediocre, except for The Great Waltz (1938), though her part as Johann Strauss’s wife was considerably trimmed. A nonconformist, Rainer walked around Hollywood in slacks, wearing no make-up, her hair in disarray at the height of 1930s glamour. She also decided to expend her energies elsewhere than on her film career. She helped refugee children from Spain and later, with the US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, assisted European victims of Nazi Germany.
When her disastrous marriage to Odets ended in divorce in 1940, she was living in New York. There she became friendly with Nin, famous for her erotica and her passionate affair with the writer Henry Miller. “My strongest impression when I met her [Rainer] was that you were twins of a sort,” Miller wrote to Nin. “Neither of you belong in this world.” After Nin attended a play in which Rainer was performing, she wrote long descriptions of the actor in her diary. Rainer becomes a “flame” when she performs, says Nin, and certainly “would have been loved by [the French playwright Antonin] Artaud”.
Before she left Hollywood, Rainer was told by Brecht that he would like to write a play for her. She suggested an adaptation of Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle) by AH Klabund, based on a Chinese tale, which became The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Later, she and the playwright fell out, and she never performed in it.
Soon after, in 1945, Rainer retreated into a long and happy marriage with the publisher Robert Knittel. They travelled extensively and lived for many years in Switzerland. She became a mother, painted and did a play from time to time, notably Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, and Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which she played Nina. But for most people, Rainer had disappeared from the public eye.
In the late 50s, Rainer and her family moved to Britain. She appeared in some television plays on the BBC, including Stone Faces (1957), a play written for her by JB Priestley. She also played Regina in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, where she had performed with Reinhardt many years before. In 1973, she took the taxing part of the narrator in Honegger’s oratorio Judith, in French, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with Jessye Norman singing the soprano part.
In 1997, she was enticed into returning to the big screen for the first time in over half a century in The Gambler, based on Dostoevsky. Though the film received lukewarm reviews, Rainer was universally praised. According to Variety: “The pic briefly gets a real lift when the legendary Luise Rainer bursts on the scene in a wonderfully showy part as a gambling-addicted granny.”
When I met Rainer at her London flat in 1996, she was an incredibly energetic 86-year-old whom I recognised as the same woman described by Miller as having “wonderful gesture and bearing, such a gracious way of carrying her head, such delicacy”, and the intense and dark eyes that shone from the screen over half a century before.
She is survived by her daughter, Francesca.
• Luise Rainer, actor, born 12 January 1910; died 30 December 2014
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Lambert Wilson is the son of actor Georges Wilson. he was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France in 1958. He had a major role in Fred Zinnemann’s “Five Days, One Summer” with Sean Connery in 1982. His other movies include The Matrix” films, “The Last September” and “Sahara”. TCM Overview:This lanky leading man has emerged as one of France’s more prominent exports of the 1980s.
The son of actor Georges Wilson–the father directed his son in “La vouivure” (1986)–Lambert Wilson starred as the destructive Quentin in Andre Techine’s psychodrama “Rendez-vous” and as the cynical photographer in Vera Belmont’s nostalgic “Rouge Baiser” (both 1985). He also appeared as the adulterous Caspasian Speckler in Peter Greenaway’s “The Belly of an Architect” (1987) and made a move toward US stardom as the Marquis de Lafayette in the Merchant-Ivory production “Jefferson in Paris” (1995). In John Duigan’s “The Leading Man” (1997), Wilson had the major role of a playwright who hires an actor (Jon Bon Jovi) to seduce his wife (Anna Galiena). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
“From time to time Anouk Aimee has been on the verge of great success in American or British films. She has been flirted with more than most of her compatriots but she has never responded with much enthusiasm. ‘ I was never an actress with a flame’ she said once. She admits to having lost all interest in her career when her daughter was born in 1951 and probably not have persevered at all had her romantic life gone smoothly. She might have disappeared from public view years ago had not producers and directors sought her out: for even when she is not trying, she has something of the same magical femininity as Ingrid Bergman” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars 2 – International Years” (1972)
Anouk Aimee was born in Paris in 1932. She made her film debut in 1947 in “La Maison sous le mer”. Three years later she made her UK debut on film in “Golden Salamander” with Trevor Howard. She starred in “La Dolca Vita” and “Lola”. In 1966 she had a giant international hit with “A Man and a Woman”. This resulted in offers from Hollywood and she made “Model Shop” and “Justine” in the U.S. She then retunred to European film making.
“Jewish Woman’s Chronicle:
Anouk Aimée is perhaps best known for her remarkable presence as an icon of cool, sophisticated beauty in more than seventy films across seven decades, including such classics as Alexandre Astruc’s Le Rideau Cramoisi (The Crimson Curtain, 1952), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1963), André Delvaux’s Un Soir, un Train (One Evening, One Train, 1968), George Cukor’s Justine (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), Robert Altman’s Prêt à Porter (Ready to Wear, 1994) and, most unforgettably, Claude Lelouch’s Un Homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, 1966) opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant—a film that virtually reignited the lush on-screen romance in an era of skeptical modernism. Words like “regal,” “intelligent” and “enigmatic” are frequently associated with her, giving Aimée an aura of disturbing and mysterious beauty that has earned her the status of one of the hundred sexiest stars in film history (in a 1995 poll conducted by Empire Magazine).Her striking features are known to many who have never seen her films. The much-vaunted comparison with Jacqueline Kennedy is more than physical; film historian Ginette Vincendeau notes that Aimée’s films “established her as an ethereal, sensitive and fragile beauty with a tendency to tragic destinies or restrained suffering.”
While little is known of her Jewish background, it is in one of her most recent roles as a Holocaust survivor returning to Auschwitz, in Marceline Loridan’s directorial debut (at age seventy-five), La Petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees, 2002), that Anouk Aimée brilliantly dramatizes her identity as a Jewish woman. Herself only a young girl during the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime, each with its specific program of antisemitic persecution, Aimée is a perfect fit for Loridan’s autobiographical work. (Loridan was a fourteen-year-old inmate of Auschwitz). At the New York City screening of the film in the spring of 2003, Aimée was still reticent about her own life during the war (she referred to a relative who had been deported and killed but stopped short of saying what she herself experienced), yet she spoke with eloquence and animation about the importance of documenting this chapter of Jewish history.
Anouk Aimée was born Françoise Sorya on April 27, 1932 in Paris. Both her parents were actors; her mother, Geneviève Sorya, was not Jewish, but her father, Henry Dreyfus (who used the name Henry Murray professionally), was. There may be some connection to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but this has never been elaborated. She was referred to variously as Françoise Sorya, Françoise Dreyfus or Nicole Dreyfus until her acting career (begun when she was just fourteen, with a role in Henri Calef’s La Maison sous la mer [The House by the Sea, 1947]) earned her the name by which she is known. At first she was simply Anouk, taken from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La Fleur de l’âge (The Flower of the Age); it was the poet Jacques Prévert, writing André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone (The Lovers of Verona, 1949) specifically for her, who playfully added the symbolic last name that would forever associate her with the affective power of her screen roles.Already talented as a child, Aimée studied acting and ballet in Paris, London and Marseilles; her training in dance at the famous Bauer-Therond school prepared her for future roles as a performer in such films as Lola and The Model Shop (Demy, 1969).
Anouk Aimée has been making films all her life; during the 1980s and 1990s, when other actresses had difficulty finding roles for “mature” women, she made one film a year and she continues now into the twenty-first century. (“You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older,” she said in 1988.)
In 2003 she was awarded an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world.” Even though she has been referred to as “ageless,” “a legend,” and “a goddess of cinema mythology,” quite possibly her role in The Little Meadow of Birch-Trees (based on the real-life experience of its maker, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, as a teenage prisoner in Birkenau), so close to her own experience as a Jewish woman who comes to terms with her wartime past, contributed to the way she sees herself now, as an icon of world peace and reconciliation rather than the enigmatic diva of the European art cinema.
Her career can be roughly divided into three phases—the early arthouse avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s in which she defined a new kind of modern heroine; the period of international stardom, initiated by the Academy Award nomination and Best Foreign Film award and the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme and marked by work with many of world cinema’s most talented directors; and the phase of the committed woman, still beautiful but less concerned with screen presence than with using her position and her fame to make a difference in the world. Her three marriages loosely correspond to these time periods; she was briefly married to director Nikos Papatakis (1951–1954), then to composer Pierre Barouh (Baruch) from 1966 to 1969 (who appeared with her when she received the Golden Globe for Un Homme et une femme), and finally to actor Albert Finney (1970–1978), when she seems to have semi-retired from acting for a while.
But it is as a single woman for the last twenty-five years that Aimée has solidified her reputation both as a major actress with international appeal and as a champion of human rights. She lives in the Montmartre section of Paris with her daughter Manuela, continuing to demonstrate her “distinctive combination of melancholy and passion” in films that match the intensity of her beauty with the complexity of mature roles..
Anouk Aimée, the French actress who has died aged 92, became a European star when she played the sultry Maddelena, the rich socialite “bored with Rome”, in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and the film director’s wife in his autobiographical 8½ (1962); she made her international reputation, however, as the beautiful young widow in Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme.
The film, a bittersweet romance between a film-script girl and a racing driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), both of whom have recently lost their respective spouses, was the surprise hit of 1966. Released at a time of Beatlemania, race riots and anti-war protests, A Man and a Woman (as it was known in English-speaking countries) transported filmgoers to another, gentler world – a fantasy France of windswept beaches and grainy close-ups, all intercut with Francis Lai’s lush, pulsating score.
Shot by the 28-year-old director in a few weeks for only $100,000, it went on to take more than $25 million at the box office and win a slew of awards – best picture at Cannes and Oscars for best foreign film and best original screenplay.
Anouk Aimée won a Golden Globe, a best actress Oscar nomination and a place in the hearts of all unreconstructed romantics who either imagined themselves in the shoes of Jean-Louis Trintignant or wished they had the actress’s striking cheekbones and potent and enigmatic sexuality.
The film led to Anouk Aimée appearing in a clutch of American-financed pictures including Justine (1969), in which she played a Jewish prostitute living in Alexandria who sleeps her way to the top. But although she remained one of the unquestioned giants of French cinema and appeared in some 70 films – working with, among others, Marcel Carné, Jacques Demy, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman and Bernardo Bertolucci – nothing she did in later life would win her the same acclaim as Un homme et une femme.
In 1986 Claude Lelouch sought to reprise the success of the original film with a more lavish update entitled Un homme et une femme: vingt ans déjà, in which Trintignant, now retired, and Anouk Aimée, a producer of big-budget epics, get together to make a film about their early love affair. Preditably, perhaps, the film totally lacked the charm of the original and bombed at the box office.
She was born Françoise Sorya Dreyfus, the daughter of two actors, in Paris on April 27 1932. Her father (who was known professionally as Henry Murray) was Jewish, and little is known of her life, or that of her family, during the war, though it appears that she spent much of it in England, where she attended St Leonard’s School at Mayfield in Sussex. There, as she recalled, she learnt “hockey and horse-riding, but left before taking my exams, because Jacques Prévert wrote Les amants de Vérone for me”.
That film was released in 1949, but in fact her film career had begun three years earlier, in 1946, when, aged 14, she was walking down the Rue du Colisée in Paris’s eighth arrondissement and the director Henri Calef stopped her and asked if she would like to be in a film. “I was with my mother, on the way to see Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck,” she recalled.
She made her debut in Calef’s La maison sous la mer (“The House by the Sea”, 1947). The following year she decided to take the name Anouk from the character she played in Marcel Carné’s unfinished film La fleur de l’âge (“The Flower of the Age”). When Prévert directed her in Les amants de Vérone, he suggested she add the name Aimée.
Though she was much in demand in the late 1940s and 1950s, Anouk Aimée did not fall in love with acting until she played the rich nymphomaniac in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960): “With Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, it was a big festival, a beautiful party,” she recalled.
In between that film and Fellini’s 8 1/2 she appeared as the smoulderingly sexy cabaret dancer (and single mother) of Jacques Demy’s first feature, Lola (1961). Eight years later, she worked with Demy again on a sequel in Los Angeles called The Model Shop, with Gary Lockwood, that flopped at the box office.
Although Anouk Aimée appeared in dozens of films over the years, from the 1970s she appeared almost exclusively in supporting roles, as mothers and grandmothers, often with a bare handful of scenes and little to say. While her performances were invariably models of subtlety, they hardly matched the superstar roles played by Catherine Deneuve or Jeanne Moreau.
Anouk Aimée sometimes claimed that this was because she did not always make the right choices: “I’ve taken parts I didn’t particularly like because I wanted to work with the director – Altman, for example.” (She appeared as the mistress of a fashion dignitary in his 1994 black comedy Prêt-à-Porter, which won mostly negative reviews.)
At other times she claimed that she had been disconcerted by all the public exposure that followed Un homme et une femme: “I got frightened. It was like a car that was going too fast to control. The Academy nomination, the Golden Globes. It was like too much chocolate mousse. I panicked.”
But Omar Sharif, for one, implied that there might be a different reason, when he claimed that she had given up her career several times to “follow men around the world”.
Anouk Aimée was married four times. Her first marriage, to Edouard Zimmermann, lasted less than a year. Her second, to the Greek film director Nico Papatakis, lasted three years, as did her third, to the actor Pierre Barouh, who had played her deceased stuntman-husband in Un homme et une femme. In 1970 she married her fourth husband, the British actor Albert Finney, and lived in London for seven years before that marriage, too, broke down.
In between, there were liaisons with Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif and Trevor Howard, whom she met while they were on location to make a now-forgotten thriller in Tunisia in 1950.
Howard was 37 at the time and married to the actress Helen Cherry, yet his onscreen chemistry with the 18-year-old Anouk Aimée was obvious, and one night they were spotted by a journalist clearly intent on something more than rehearsing their lines. Although, under pressure from his wife, Howard dumped Anouk Aimée the moment the film crew returned to Britain, the young actress continued to pursue him.
By her 60s Anouk Aimée was living alone in Paris with a dog and 10 cats. Like Brigitte Bardot she became a keen supporter of the anti-fur movement, but unlike Bardot she kept her looks into old age. She was proud of never having had cosmetic surgery.
In later life she won acclaim for her performance in Henry Jaglom’s Festival in Cannes (2000), in which she played an ageing screen legend attending the Film Festival who must decide whether to do a cameo in a Tom Hanks blockbuster or a more substantial lead role in a low-budget independent directed by Greta Scacchi. Later, she was Napoleon’s mother in a six-hour television mini-series about the great man (also starring Gérard Depardieu and John Malkovich), directed by Yves Simoneau.
In 2019 she came out of retirement to appear opposite Trintignan once again in Claude Lelouch’s Les plus belles années d’une vie (“The Best Years of a Life”), a third visit to the characters from Un homme et une femme; nostalgia-steeped, it was an improvement on the previous sequel.
In 2003 she received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where she used the opportunity to step out of her role as star to advocate for peace “for the children of the world”.
Anouk Aimée had a daughter by her second husband, Niko Papatakis.
Anouk Aimée, born April 27 1932, died June 18 2024
His website here. Alain Delon is regarded as a giant of French cinema. In the sixties he attempted Hollywood but by the end of the decade he resumed his career in Europe. He was born in 1935 in Sceaux, France. At a young age he joined the military and spent some time in Indochina. He was noticed by a talent scout in Cannes and in 1957 in “Sois Belle et Tais-toi”. In 1960 he made an international breakthrough with Rene Clement’s “Purple Noon”. Luchino Visconti cast him in “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard”. In 1964 he went to Hollywood to make “Once A Thief” opposite Ann-Margret. In 1970 he had a major hit with “Borsalino”
TCM overview:
One of the great cinematic anti-heroes of the 1960s and 1970s, French actor Alain Delon brought a sense of daring and insouciant charm to his portrayals of gangsters, hired guns and men of mystery in such international hits as “Purple Noon” (1961), “Le Samourai” (1967), “The Sicilian Clan” (1969) and “Monsieur Klein” (1976). That he appeared, at least in part, to live an outlaw life off the screen as well, with multiple high-profile affairs and alleged connections to organized crime, only furthered his appeal to moviegoers on both sides of the Atlantic, who were drawn to his icy, implacable calm and Gallic bravado. On occasion, he ventured to Hollywood, but the results were frequently subpar; viewers were not interested in seeing Delon play for laughs opposite Dean Martin in “Texas Across the River” (1964) or as a cardboard hero in “Concorde Airport ’79” (1979). He was best served in his native country, where he dominated the box office well into the 1980s before pulling in the reins to focus on marketing his name through a variety of products. On occasion, the lure of the silver screen proved too strong to resist, and he would return to acting on several occasions during the ’90s and early 2000s. Though his famous mane of hair was silvered and the smoothness of his face marked by time, Delon’s extraordinary magnetism remained untouched by the decades – irrefutable proof of his status as one of France’s most enduring leading men.
Born Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon on Nov. 8, 1935 in the town of Sceaux, outside of Paris, France, he was the son of Fabien Delon, and his wife, Edith. His parents divorced when Delon was four, and subsequently remarried. The turmoil in his home was reflected in his schooling. An unruly student, Delon was expelled from six schools by the time he was a teenager. He eventually left school altogether at age 14 to work at his stepfather’s butcher shop before enlisting in the French Navy, where he served in the First Indochina War. Again, his rebellious nature got the better of him, and he spent 11 months of his four-year stint in a military prison for lack of discipline. Delon was dishonorably discharged in 1956 and returned to France to work a series of menial jobs. While in Marseilles, he became friendly with actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who invited Delon to join him at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. There, his striking good looks attracted the attention of numerous producers and talent scouts, among them allegedly a representative of “Gone with the Wind” (1939) producer David O. Selznick, who offered a multi-picture deal, provided that he learn English. Delon returned to Paris, where he met director Yves Allégret, who gave him his first screen role in “Quand la femme s’en mêle” (“When the Woman Butts In”) (1957) as a young hit man hired to kill the rival of a club owner (Jean Servais), a felicitous bit of casting that would echo throughout Delon’s career. Delon earned his first leading role in “Christine” (1958), as a young soldier who fell in love with an innocent (Romy Schneider) while involved in a scandalous affair with the wife of a commanding officer. Delon and Schneider became an off-screen couple as well, going on to announce their engagement in 1959.
The following year, Delon earned his star-making role as Patricia Highsmith’s murderous anti-hero, Tom Ripley, in René Clément’s “Purple Noon” (1960). His cool performance as an amoral young man who murdered and assumed his friend’s identity to advance his social standing won favor from critics as well as Highsmith herself, and soon established Delon as a major European star. A richer, more sensitive turn as a young Italian in love with a prostitute (Annie Giradot) in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers” (1961) followed, as did his stage debut that same year opposite Schneider in a production of “Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” directed by Visconti. Delon was soon the leading man of choice for many of Europe’s most acclaimed directors, including Michaelangelo Antonioni for “Eclipse” (1962), Julien Duvivier for “The Devil and the Ten Commandments” (1963), and Henri Verneuil, who cast him as a reckless criminal opposite French screen legend Jean Gabin in “Any Number Can Win” (1963). Delon also garnered a reputation as a rogue off-screen as well when Schneider called off their engagement in 1963 upon discovering that he had fathered a son, Christian, with the German singer-actress Nico. The following year, he married actress Nathalie Barthélemy, with whom he had a son, actor Anthony Delon. I
A 1963 Golden Globe nomination for his turn as the headstrong nephew of Italian prince Burt Lancaster in Visconti’s celebrated “The Leopard” increased Delon’s international visibility, leading to offers from Hollywood. Save for the gritty neo-noir “Once a Thief” (1965), with Delon as a reformed criminal dogged by the law (Van Heflin) and the mob (Jack Palance), his Hollywood efforts were largely glossy, empty affairs like the all-star “Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1965) and the truly dreadful Western comedy “Texas Across the River” (1966) with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop. He returned to France the following year to appear in his iconic role as an icy, meticulous hit man in Jean-Pierre Melville’s New Wave cult favorite “Le Samourai” (“The Samurai”) (1967). His carefully controlled performance as a moody loner who lived and died by a strict code of personal conduct would come to dominate his screen persona, and Delon would play variations on the role in subsequent films like “Le Motocyclette” (“Girl on a Motorcycle”) (1968), which increased his standing among both French and international audiences. His marriage to Barthélemy ended during this period, due to his affair with actress Mireille Darc.
Delon’s ascent to fame was severely threatened by a 1969 scandal involving the murder of his former bodyguard, Stefan Markovic. Investigations into the killing unearthed links between the actor and numerous members of the European underworld, as well as scandalous connections to political figures like the wife of French Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. Delon was repeatedly held for questioning in regard to the case, but was eventually acquitted. However, many industry figures believed that his association with Markovic would ruin his career. To the surprise of many, Delon became even more popular with French moviegoers, who felt that his connections to criminal elements lent a note of veritas to his numerous gangster roles. He quickly capitalized on the notoriety by starring in a string of popular crime films, including “The Sicilian Clan” (1969) and Jacques Deray’s “Borsolino” (1970), which teamed him with enduring French movie idol Jean-Paul Belmondo. Delon also produced many of these films through his company, Delbeau Productions, and even enjoyed a continental pop hit with a 1973 duet with Dalida of the ballad “Paroles, paroles.”
Delon again attempted to break into the American market with Michael Winner’s political thriller “Scorpio” (1973), which reunited him with Burt Lancaster. But he was soon back in France, where he ruled the box office through crime pictures like “Two Men in Town” (1973) with Gabin, and “Flic Story” (1975), based on French police detective Roger Borniche’s nine-year pursuit of escaped killer Emile Buisson (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He stepped briefly away from police procedurals to play the masked hero “Zorro” (1975), a choice made largely to please his young son. The following year, he received a Cesar nomination for Best Actor as “Monsieur Klein” (1976), a French art dealer who is mistaken by the Nazis for a wanted Jewish fugitive. A second Cesar acting nod came the following year for the police drama “Mort d’un pourri” (“Death of a Corrupt Man”) (1977). This again led him back to the United States to play an airline captain in “Concorde Airport ’79,” but its abysmal failure nixed any further ventures to Hollywood.
In 1981, Delon made his directorial debut with “Pour la peau d’un flic” (1981), a modest crime picture that he fashioned as a tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville. He would direct two additional, entirely minor thrillers before balancing his time between producing and occasional acting appearances. By the 1980s, his famously aquiline features had grown craggy, and he was no longer the actor of choice for romantic leading men, though his personal appeal remained untouched, as evidenced by his 1987 romance with the much-younger model Rosalie van Breemen. Delon gave a critically acclaimed turn as a haughty but miserable royal in Volker Schlondorff’s “Swann in Love” (1982) and finally earned a Cesar for “Notre Histoire” (“Our History”) (1984), starring as a dissolute middle-aged man who became fixated on a disinterested prostitute and single mother (Nathalie Baye). These triumphs were compounded by the blockbuster hit “Parole de flic” (1985), an action-packed crime picture that featured the 50-year-old Delon performing his own stunts.
But advancing age, as well as the expensive failure of “The Passage” in 1986, forced Delon to consider his future projects with greater care. He directed his focus toward a popular line of products that bore his name – from perfume and cigarettes to sunglasses – that became the epitome of cinematic cool after Chow Yun-fat wore a pair in John Woo’s epic crime drama “A Better Tomorrow” (1986). There were still film projects, most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) (1990) with Delon as a hitchhiker taken in by Domiziana Giordano’s mystery woman. The thriller “L’ours en peluche” (“Teddy Bear”) (1994), with Delon stalked by an anonymous caller, was a return to form, but he announced his retirement from acting after Patrice LeCompte’s “Un chance sur deux” (1998), an action film that reunited him with Belmondo, fizzled at the box office.
He did return sporadically over the next decade, most notably as a vain Julius Caesar in the smash European hit “Asterix at the Olympic Games” (2008). Between 1991 and 1995, he also reaped numerous honors for his lifetime of film work, including an Honorary Golden Bear in 1991 from the 45th Berlin International Film Festival, as well knighthood from the Legion of Honor that same year. In 1995, he was made an Officer of the National Order of Merit, while in 2005, his knighthood was promoted to the next highest class, that of Officer.
By Paul GaitaThe above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Ulla Jacobsson was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1929. She started her film career working for the great Ingmar Bergman in such films as “Smiles of a Summer Night”. She came on the international scene in the early 60’s and appeared opposite Glenn Ford in “Love is a Ball”, with Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in “Zulu” and Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris in “The Heroes of Telemark”. She came to the U.S. in the early 60’s to guest star in an episode of the classic series “Naked City”. She died in Vienna at the age of 53.
Her obituary in “The New York Times”:
Ulla Jacobsson, a Swedish-born film and stage actress, died of bone cancer Aug. 22 in a hospital in Vienna. She was 53 years old. Mrs. Jacobsson began her career in her native Gothenberg and appeared in classical and modern theater roles before turning to film.
She won international acclaim in the Swedish film ”One Summer of Happiness,” which took the top prize at the Cannes film festival in 1951. She was featured in Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish classic, ”Smiles of a Summer Night.”
”Ulla Jacobsson as the farm girl is a sensitive and expressive young thing who stunningly portrays the capricesand the terrors of an innocent maid in love,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times of her performance in ”One Summer of Happiness.” Among her other films were ”All the Joy of Earth,” ”Eternal Love” and ”Zulu.”
Ms. Jacobsson, who was married to an Austrian scientist, lived in Vienna.
From blog: European Film Stars:
Ulla Jacobsson was born in Mölndal, a part of the Göteborg (Gothenburg) urban area on the west-coast of Sweden in 1929. After her stage debut in Göteborg’s Stadsteater in 1947, she appeared in plays by Kaj Munk,Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, and William Shakespeare. She made her first film appearance in Bärande hav/The seas we travel (1951, Arne Mattsson) with Alf Kjellin. Her second film with the same director, Hon dansade en sommar/One Summer of Happiness (1951, Arne Mattsson), was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Based on the novel by Per Olof Ekstrom, the story revolves around the romance between 19 year old student Goran (Folke Sundquist) and the 17 year old farmer’s daughter Kerstin (Ulla Jacobsson). A scene where Goran and Kerstin swim and embrace in the nude caused a sensation and made Jacobsson world-famous. In Cannes the film won a prize for the music and at the Berlin Film Festival the film was awarded with the Golden Bear. Next Jacobsson appeared in such Swedish productions as All jordens fröjd/All the World’s Delights (1953, Rolf Husberg), the August Strindberg adaptation Karin Månsdotter (1954, Alf Sjöberg), and Herr Arnes penningar/Sir Arne’s Treasure (1954, Gustaf Molander). In Germany she also appeared in films, includingDie Heilige Lüge/Pious Lies (1954, Wolfgang Liebeneiner) with Karlheinz Böhm, and Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld/The Priest from Kirchfeld (1955, Hans Deppe) with Claus Holm. Another international hit was the comedy of mannersSommarnattens leende/Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman). Bergman’s comic masterpiece opens with middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) again failing to consummate his marriage with the much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). At IMDb, reviewer Clavallie writes: “Charming, light-hearted, delicate, and romantic are not the terms most people think to use when describing Bergman films, and yet Smiles of a Summer Night is all of these. This is one of the most sophisticated romantic movies ever filmed, and a pure delight. It is a clever and witty romance based on the classic elements of French farce. Simply wonderful.” The film’s success started Jacobsson’s international career. In France she starred in Crime et châtiment/Crime and punishment (1956, Georges Lampin), an updated version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s story about the Nietzchean student Raskolnikov (Bernard Blier). In Germany she appeared with O.E. Hasse and Maximilian Schell in Die Letzten werden die Ersten sein/The Last Ones Shall Be First (1957, Rolf Hansen). That year she moved to Vienna, where she was offered an engagement at the Theater in der Josefstadt.
In the early 1960’s, Ulla Jacobsson started appearing in English language films. She made one American film, the light romantic comedy Love Is a Ball (1963, David Swift) starring Charles Boyer. At AllMovie, Hal Ericksonwrites: “the graceful and talented Jacobsson had to withstand an idiotic ad campaign which tried to redefine her as a Swedish ‘sex symbol’.” Normally she tended to play serious and anxious looking characters. In Great Britain she became better known for her part of the daughter of a missionary (played by Jack Hawkins) in Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield). Filmed on a grand scale, Zulu is a rousing recreation of the 1879 siege of Rorke’s Drift in Natal, Africa. An army of 4,000 Zulu warriors had already decimated a huge British garrison; and now threatened the much smaller Rorke’s Drift with less than 100 British soldiers. After this film, Jacobsson started hopscotching between Europe and England for the balance of her career. Other notable films include the war film The Heroes of Telemark (1965, Anthony Mann) with Kirk Douglas, and La Servante/The Servant (1970, Jacques-Paul Bertrand) with France Anglade. She won the Deutschen Filmpreis (German Film Award) for Supporting Actress in Alle Jahre wieder/Next Year, Same Time (1967, Ulrich Schamoni) with Sabine Sinjen. She reunited with her first director, Arne Matsson for Bamse/My Father’s Mistress (1970, Arne Mattsson). Her last films were Wolfgang Petersen’s thriller Einer Von Uns Beiden/One or the Other (1975, Wolfgang Petersen) with Elke Sommer, andFassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit/Fox and His Friends (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder). The latter was the interesting and heartbreaking story of Fox, a gay sideshow worker (played by Fassbinder himself) who wins the lottery, only to be exploited to the hilt by his upper-class lover (Peter Chatel). Jacobsson played Chatel’s mother. Later she only made a few more TV-films, including the miniseries Das Ding/The Thing (1978, Uli Edel). The reason for her retirement was that she had fallen ill. In 1982 she died from bone cancer in a hospital in her hometown Vienna. She was 53. Ulla Jacobsson was married three times. Her first marriage was to the Viennese engineer Josef Kornfeld, with whom she had a daughter, Ditte. Then she was married to Dutch painter Frank Lodeizen, with whom she had a son, Martin. Lodeizen’s daughter Rifka Lodeizen from a later marriage is now a well known film actress in the Netherlands. Jacobsson finally married Austrian ethnologist Hans Winfried Rohsmann.
Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901. She began her career in German silent film and then won international acclaim as Lola-Lola in “The Blue Angel” with Emil Jannings. The popularity of the film led to offers from Hollywood and Dietrich went to the U.S. in 1930. She had a contract with Paramount Studios and her first Hollywood film was “Morocco” opposite Gary Cooper. Her most famous movies include “Shangai Express” with Anna May Wong, “The Garden of Allah” with Charles Boyer and “Knights Without Armour” with Robert Donat. In later life she had a very successful career as a concert performer. She had a late career movie success with “Witness for the Prosecution” with Tyrone Power. On retirement she went to live in Paris and became reclusive in her later years. Marlene Dietrich died in 1992 at the age of 90. Her website can be accessed here.
Celebrated for her roles in The Blue Angel and Destry Rides Again, she appeared in 50 films between 1923 and 1964. She was the last well-known survivor of the Kaiser’s Germany.
Her theme tunes – Falling in Love Again, Johnny, The Boys in the Back Room and Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – haunted generations; her rendering of Lilli Marlene became as popular as that of Lile Andersen which was the favourite of British and German troops in the Second World War.
Husky-voiced and fair-haired, with heavily-lidded eyes, she displayed a cool ‘don’t care’ expression of world-weary disillusion. In an age when stardom is transitory, she proved enduring.
Marlene Dietrich was a postmistress at dispensing her own dangerous blend of glamour and carried through life the aura of Berlin’s smoky decadence.
Blonde, Teutonic, with high-chiselled cheekbones, she mesmerised her audiences by innuendo, letting her vacant eyes drift over the room, pulling in her heavily magenta-ed lower lip, displaying all the artifice of languor.
Famed for playing prostitutes in films, her world was never one of convention. She yearned for all that was artificial.
As a singer she was a polished performer, alternatively lazy in mood and powerfully aggressive, almost paramilitary. Her delivery of Johnny was both breathy and erotic and she manipulated the microphone in a manner nothing less than sexual.
No one who saw her spectacular entrance down the winding staircase of London’s Café de Paris in the 1950s is ever likely to forget it. Sparkling from head to foot with no shortage of white mink, she did not so much descend as glide down like a serpent, disdainful, glamorous, a little threatening.
Far from modest, Dietrich relished a record of the applause at these performances. One evening she played this to Noël Coward, explaining: ‘This is where I turn to the right . . . Now I turn to the left.’ When the first side ended, she threatened to turn the record over. Coward erupted: ‘Marlene, cease at once this mental masturbation]’ Marlene Dietrich was born in Berlin on Dec 27, 1901, the younger daughter of a Prussian officer, Louis Dietrich, and his wife, Josephine Felsing, who came from a family of jewellers. She spent part of her childhood in Weimar.
Her father died in 1911 and her mother, who then married Eduard von Losch, a Grenadier colonel, played a big part in her life. She was brought up in the Germanic tradition of duty and discipline. The theatre was in her blood from the start; she worshipped Rilke, read Lagerlof and Hofmannsthal and knew Erich Kästner by heart.
She was keenly musical and learned the violin. From 1906 to 1918, she attended the Auguste Viktoria School for Girls in Berlin. At the end of the First World War, she was enrolled in the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik but stayed only for a few months.
The family soon fled to the country, where her stepfather died. In 1919, she entered the Weimar Konservatorium to study the violin. She hoped to become a professional violinist but a damaged wrist destroyed this hope.
In 1920, Marlene was back in Berlin. The next year she auditioned for the Max Reinhardt Drama School and played the widow in The Taming of the Shrew.
A string of minor parts followed. Marlene lived in virtual penury, worked in a glove factory and acted and danced. It was a depressing way of life.
In 1923, she played Lucie in The Tragedy of Love, on the set of which she met her husband, Rudi Sieber. It was by no means love at first sight but Marlene began by being in great awe of him. They married and had a daughter, Maria (born in 1925).
The marriage did not last. Sieber was overshadowed by Dietrich, who described him as a ‘very, very sensitive person’. She bought him a farm in California where he dwelt with his animals, a mistress (until she went mad), her blessing and her financial support; he died in 1976.
In the late 1920s, Dietrich acted and filmed in various productions in Berlin, including I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.
In 1930, she was discovered by the Viennese director, Josef von Sternberg, who detected in her the raw sexuality of a seductive vamp and brought her to fame in his film The Blue Angel. Von Sternberg transformed her from a rather brawny girl with the slight air of a female impersonator into a creature of glamour.
Even in The Blue Angel, as she sits on the barstool as the seductive temptress Lola-Lola, luring the salivating professor to his doom, her legs appear more well covered than is now considered fashionable. Von Sternberg recognised the conflict within her: ‘Her personality was one of extreme sophistication and of an almost childish simplicity,’ he wrote.
Originally Dietrich had been rejected for the part as ‘not at all bad from the rear but do we not also need a face?’ But then von Sternberg saw her by chance in the Georg Kaiser play ZweiKrawatten. She was gazing bored at the action on stage and he was drawn to her disdain and poise.
Despite her success, UFA did nor renew her contract and so she signed with Paramount and emigrated to Hollywood. There she made several memorable films for von Sternberg.
Morocco, in which she played a cabaret star in love with a French legionnaire (Gary Cooper), included a scene in which Dietrich, dressed as a man, plants an unchaste kiss on a girl’s mouth in a café. The film brought massive fame and Marlene contrasted the adulation she received off camera to the virtual martyrdom she endured under von Sternberg’s precise and relentless direction.
Dishonoured followed, in which she played an Austrian spy, who fixed her make-up in the reflection of an officer’s sabre and applied her lipstick while a German officer ranted at her. The firing squad then shot her dead.
She was described as a ‘vamp with brains and humour’ and was paid pounds 50,000.
Von Sternberg was harshly criticised in his later films for presenting Dietrich in a series of lavish films in which she was little more than a clothes-horse, bedecked in black lace, feathers and jewels – Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman.
These criticisms von Sternberg repudiated. Dietrich displayed a mixture of self-love and outward tenderness, her egoism and Germanic ruthlessness belied by a sweetly feminine mouth and high, serene forehead. In 1933, at von Sternberg’s suggestion, she played Lily Czepanek in Song of Songs for Reuben Mamoulian. Von Sternberg ended his association in 1935 (following which his career floundered).
He concluded: ‘When we first met, her pay was lower than that of a bricklayer and, had she remained where she was, she might have had to endure the fate of a Germany under Hitler.’ Whatever the pains of the association, it had been a rewarding one.
Dietrich’s association with von Sternberg was the subject of an analytic study, In the Realm of Pleasure, concerning von Sternberg, Dietrich and the ‘masochistic aesthetic’.
The author, Gaylyn Studlar, concluded: ‘Dietrich is frequently mentioned as an actress whose screen presence raises questions about women’s representation in Hollywood cinema. She has also acquired her own cult following of male and female, straight and gay admirers.
‘The diverse nature of this group suggests that many possible paths of pleasure can be charted across Dietrich as a signifying star image and across von Sternberg’s films as star vehicles.’
Kenneth Tynan also pursued this theme in a celebrated profile of the star: ‘She has sex but no particular gender. Her ways are mannish: the characters she played loved power and wore slacks and they never had headaches or hysterics. They were also quite undomesticated. Dietrich’s masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.’
Inevitably, the arrival of Dietrich was seen in Hollywood as that of a blonde Venus in the vanguard of Garbo, the Sphinx. There was some similarity in the style of the films (Mata Hari then Dishonoured, Queen Christina in comparison to The Scarlet Empress).
It was generally accepted that if any rivalry existed, Garbo won without effort. A remarkable composite photograph by Steichen exists portraying Dietrich and Garbo together but, if they ever met, it was an unsatisfactory encounter.
At the behest of Mercedes de Acosta, with whom both were romantically linked, they made the wearing of slacks by females fashionable. In 1936, Dietrich starred opposite Cary Grant in Desire and then played in The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour and Angel. In 1939, came her energetic portrayal of Frenchy, the Wild West saloon keeper in Destry Rides Again.
This classic included Dietrich’s spirited wrestling with James Stewart, and she gave tongue to the evocative song The Boys in the Back Room, while bestriding the bar.
In the early years of the Second World War, there were more films for more directors. Meanwhile, in Germany Hitler destroyed all but one copy of The Blue Angel and went to great lengths to try to lure Dietrich to his cause.
But in 1943 she assumed the honorary rank of Colonel in the American Army and made radio broadcasts and personal appearances on behalf of the American war effort. In 1944, she joined the United States Overseas Tour and paid extensive visits to the Allied troops in Europe.
Dressed in an elegant version of military uniform, her blonde hair as flowing and feminine as ever, her mission was to boost morale, to entertain and to encourage Allied victory. There is film footage of Dietrich greeting the Fifth Army with a jaunty ‘Hello, Boys]’ and congratulating them on their singing.
Jean-Pierre Aumont was a fellow actor she met in wartime Italy and who was destined to become a lifelong friend. He summed up her role: ‘In the eyes of the Germans, she is a renegade who serves against them on behalf of the American Army. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her.
‘Under the veneer of her legendary image, Marlene Dietrich is a strong and courageous woman. There are no tears. No panic. In deciding to go sing on the field of battle, she knew the risks she was taking and assumed them courageously, without bragging and without regrets.’
Dietrich’s line was that her former countrymen had fallen under the tyranny of Hitler and that this evil must be removed. Jean Cocteau was sad that in the early post-war years she never sang Falling in Love Again in the original German in fear of being associated with the Germany of 1940.
Of her war-work, she said: ‘This is the only important work I’ve ever done.’
The elder sister Dietrich never mentioned (Elisabeth) was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and her mother died in 1945. Marlene returned to America after the cessation of fire. She was awarded the Legion of Honour and the American Medal of Freedom.
Dietrich made many further films, including Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, and Witness for the Prosecution for Wilder. In this she played two roles, one a Cockney, her unlikely accent coaxed by a despairing Noël Coward.
She also appeared in Touch of Evil for Orson Welles and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg opposite Spencer Tracy. In 1956, she contributed a memorable cameo to Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days, perched on a stool Destry-style.
Dietrich also ran her own radio spy series, Café Istanbul, on America’s ABC Network. But it was as a singer that her later career blossomed.
By now in her early 50s, she began by compèring a Madison Square benefit arranged by her daughter. Out of a wish not to sit on an elephant, she took the role of ringmaster in top hat, tailcoat and tights. This white tie look was to be a lasting trademark.
Dietrich made her debut at the Sahara, Las Vegas, in 1953 and the next year took London by storm at the Café de Paris. She was always glamorously dressed and accompanied by an orchestra of 22 men.
Thereafter she made long tours all over the world, invariably accompanied by Burt Bacharach. Though she relied heavily on Bacharach, whom she described as her ‘arranger, accompanist and conductor’, she was always her own agent.
In 1960, Dietrich made a controversial return to Germany where she was greeted by a bomb on one side and Willy Brandt on the other. She toured Israel the same year and visited Russia in 1964.
In 1967, she made her debut on Broadway. Dietrich’s one-woman show carried on until the late 1970s when accidents recurred with startling frequency.
She broke so many bones that comedians used to mimic her, singing ‘Falling off stage again . . .’ Finally, she broke her thigh in Sydney in 1976 and gave up.
As Dietrich grew older, she seemed to defy the passing years. Cecil Beaton watched her 1973 Drury Lane performance on the television and dissected her ruthlessly: ‘Somehow she has evolved an agelessness.
‘The camera picked up aged hands, a lined neck and the surgeon had not be able to cut away some little folds that formed at the corners of her mouth.
He had, however, sewn up her mouth to be so tight that her days of laughing are over . . .’
Beaton admired her dress, her ‘huge, canary yellow wig’ and her showmanship: ‘She has become a mechanical doll, a life-size mannequin. The doll can show surprise, it can walk, it can swish into place the train of its white fur coat. The audience applauds each movement, each gesture, the doll smiles incredulously – can it really be for me that you applaud? ‘Again a very simple gesture – maybe the hands flap – and again the applause, and not just from old people who remembered her tawdry films but the young find her sexy.
She is louche and not averse to giving a slight wink, yet somehow avoids vulgarity.
‘Marlene is certainly a great star, not without talent, but with a genius for believing in her self-fabricated beauty, for knowing that she is the most alluring fantastic idol, an out-of-this-world goddess or mythological animal, a sacred unicorn.’
Beaton attributed her success entirely to perseverance and an ability to magnetise audiences into believing she was a phenomenon, just as she has mesmerised herself into believing in her own beauty. An experienced critic of such creatures, Beaton could find no chink in her armour.
Despite himself, he sat enraptured. He almost concluded that she was ‘a virtuoso in the art of legerdemain’ but then he wrote: ‘ ‘You know me,’ Marlene is fond of saying. Nobody does because she’s a real phoney. She’s a liar, an egomaniac, a bore.’
It was to the music of Falling in Love Again that Dietrich bade the world a spirited farewell in Paris: ‘Je dois vous dire adieu, parce que c’est fini.’
Sparkling in sequins and surrounded by flowers, she glided off stage, bowing low, clenching and unclenching her hands as though casting a spell over the audience, returning for more applause and, finally, clinging to the curtain.
At length, she disappeared behind it by degrees with a parting wave to the besotted audience.
Her last film appearance was in 1978 as the glamorously veiled Baroness von Semering in Just a Gigolo with David Bowie, in which she intoned the title song. She was still high cheekboned but the power had gone from her voice.
The myth of Marlene lived on and the rumours of her loves – with Jean Gabin, Ernest Hemingway and others – were long discussed. She moved between her apartment in the Avenue Montaigne and a flat at 993 Park Avenue. In her ABC book, she declared: ‘A man at the sink, a woman’s apron tied around his waist, is the most miserable sight on earth.’
As for pouting, she wrote: ‘I hate it but men fall for it, so go on and pout.’
Dietrich was not only a star. She was a nurse to many friends, a cook to her grandchildren and, in reality, there was much about her that was hausfrau-ish. Kenneth Tynan described her as ‘a small eater, sticking to steaks and greenery but a great devourer of applause’.
She was the author of an unforthcoming book of memoirs, in which she finally rejected the world: ‘What remains is solitude.’
In the years of her retirement, there were rumours that Dietrich was drinking or in a home. Ginette Spanier, the directrice of Balmain, suggested that she dine in a neighbouring restaurant and that they have a tame photographer on hand to record her evening out to show that all was well.
Spanier worried that Dietrich might not be equal to the challenge but, on the night in question, the Teuton emerged from her building as glamorous as ever. When the photographer approached, she pushed Spanier firmly out of the picture to ensure she was portrayed alone.
Every time the world thought they had heard the last of her, she was either photographed at an airport or issued a curious statement to the press.
Then, in 1984, she agreed to make a documentary film with Maximillian Schell (her co-star in Judgment at Nuremberg), without appearing on camera, her voice overriding the visual images in a mixture of German and English, ‘three days this and three days that,’ as she put it.
In that film, she was dismissive of many of her old films, judging them ‘kitsch’; she rejected women’s lib as ‘penis envy’; maintained that women’s brains weighed only half a man’s and declared: ‘Well, I’m patient and I’m disciplined and I’m good.’
In extreme old age, she remained in her Paris apartment and many friends from the past were bitter when their telephone calls were answered by Dietrich pretending to be the maid.
Jean-Pierre Aumont was a favoured friend, who submitted to many hours of telephone conversation, and occasionally took her out to tea at the Plaza Athenee opposite her apartment.
She rose at six, could sometimes be seen early in the morning, draped in Indian shawls, walking a tiny dog, accompanied by a minder. But officially she was never seen and, after Garbo’s death, became the world’s most celebrated recluse, existing on a diet of champagne, autographs, reading and the telephone.
Yet the lingering image must forever be her descent of the Café de Paris staircase, the club specially adorned with cloth of gold on the walls and purple marmosets swinging on the chandeliers and Noël Coward intoning his gracious, if clipped, introduction: Though we might all enjoy Seeing Helen of Troy As a gay cabaret entertainer, I doubt that she could Be one quarter as good As our lovely, legendary Marlene
Jacques Sernas was born in Lithuania in 1925. He has had an international career with many French films to his credit. He was educated in Frances and during the Second World War was a Resistance Fighter. He was captured and imprisioned for a year in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. His first film was “Miroir” in 1947. His most famous film is “Helen of Troy” which was released in 1956. He had a supporting part in “La Dolca Vita” in 1960.
With eye-catching good looks, blond Lithuanian-born actor Jacques Sernas (A.K.A. Jack Sernas) is best known for cutting a fine figure in European spectacles in the 1950s and 1960s. Born in 1925 he was raised and schooled in Paris before joining as a French Resistance fighter during W.W.II. Captivated by German forces and imprisoned for over a year in Buchenwald, he was eventually freed and began studying medicine in his early postwar years. Acting soon caught his fancy, however, and he made his unbilled debut in the French film Miroir (1947). He would dominant both French and Italian pictures in the ensuing years with such action films as The Red Falcon (1949), in the title role, and in such costumed romancers as Anita Garibaldi (1952). He hit major international attention after being cast as Paris opposite sex sirens Rosanna Podesta and Brigitte Bardot in Helen of Troy (1956). Hollywood took brief notice but nothing much came of it. He was relegated for the most part to supporting characters, making one lasting impression as a fading matinee idol in Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Jacques Sernas died in 2015 in Rome.
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.
