Alexander Godunov was born in Sakhalin, Russia in 1949. He joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1971 and soon became it’s premier dancer. He also began acting in Russian films and played Count Vronsky in “Anna Karenina” in 1974. Whilst touring with the Bolshoi in New York in 1979, he defected and was granted political asylum. He joined the American Ballet and danced with them until 1982. In the mid 80’s he turned to acting. He wa seen with Harrison Ford in “Witness” where he played an Amish farmer. In “Die Hard” with Bruce Willis, Godunov played a violent German terrorist. His last film was “The Zone” in 1995. He died the same year at the age of 45.
“Independent” obituary:
Alexander Godunov was a dancer of handsome stature and blond good looks. He possessed a virtuoso technique and enjoyed a career of glamorous highlights in ballet and film; but his triumphs were short-lived.
From Igor Moiseyev’s Young Dancers Company, to Bolshoi Ballet, to American Ballet Theatre, to Hollywood, he brought a glossy trail of spectacular appearances that glowed brightly in the limelight of the moment.
Born in Riga in 1949, Godunov first studied ballet in his native city where he was a classmate of Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1964 the Wonder-Boy Baryshnikov joined the Vaganova Choreographic Academy in Leningrad. A year later Godunov endeavoured to follow him but could not obtain a permit. Much dismayed, he resorted to Moscow and continued his studies at the Bolshoi Choreographic School where he was fortunate enough to be taught by that consummate artist Sergei Koren.
After graduating in 1967 he spent three years with Moiseyev’s Young Dancers Company before returning to the Bolshoi fold as a soloist. He made his debut as the youth in Chopiniana and appeared in a number of classical roles in such ballets as Swan Lake, Giselle, The Nutcracker and Don Quixote.
His fame soared when Maya Plisetskaya gave him the role of Karenin in her ballet Anna Karenina (1972). He succeeded Nicolai Fadeyechev as her regular partner and danced a flamboyant Jose to her Carmen in the Alberto Alonso production of that name. He brought a panache to everything he did. He won a gold medal in the Moscow International Ballet Competition in 1973. His future with the Bolshoi seemed assured.
He married Ludmilla Vlasova, a dancer renowned for spectacular lifts. She was considerably older than him. He was a man who needed mothering. In August 1979, during the Bolshoi season in New York, Godunov decided to defect. There were dramatic scenes, with his wife sitting for three days on a plane at Kennedy airport while Soviet officials debated her freedom of choice to stay with her husband or to separate. In the end she elected to return to the Soviet Union.
It was a curious stroke of fate that Godunov’s path should cross again with that of his old class-mate Baryshnikov; or was Baryshnikov, who had become the idol of American ballet, the crucial spur for his defection? At any rate, Godunov defected in order to join American Ballet Theatre of which Baryshnikov was the star and was due to be appointed its artistic director the following year.
Godunov’s career with ABT was loaded with publicity: he was the golden boy, the talk of the town. His every appearance in the repertoire was hailed by press and public with eulogies amounting almost to hysteria, but after three years he was told there were no new roles for him. He did some guest appearances in South America under the banner Godunov and Friends and danced Swan Lake with Eva Evdokimova at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin.
During this time he built up a very close friendship with the film star Jacqueline Bisset, with whom he went to live in Los Angeles. She introduced him to movie agents and a new career in film and television opened up for him.
Godunov loved the United States and took a great interest in politics. He settled permanently in Hollywood and spent much time at the studio of Tatiana Riabouchinska, widow of David Lichine, who had been a star of de Basil’s Ballet Russe in the 1930s. Recently he had found time to visit his mother in Riga and only a month ago was filming in Budapest.
Playing in turn a kindly farmer, a tempestuous orchestral conductor and a vicious terrorist, Alexander Godunov displayed a remarkable range of characterisation in his first three film roles, and it can only have been his apparently tenuous grasp and pronunciation of the English language that impeded his movie career, writes Tom Vallance.
His debut, in Peter Weir’s Witness (1985), was particularly well received. In this popular thriller he plays an Amish farmer in love with a young widow (Kelly McGillis) whose son has witnessed a murder in New York City. Godunov makes clear (with a minimum of dialogue) the farmer’s unease as he senses a rival in the tough cop (Harrison Ford) who joins the non-violent community to trap the killers; and he retains audience sympathy with an engaging portrait of rustic equanimity.
In Richard Benjamin’s hyperactive comedy The Money Pit (1986), Godunov prudently underplayed his role as a tempestuous conductor, self-described as “shallow and self-centred”, lending droll understatement to expressions of his temperament (“The union forces me to allow you to go to lunch,” he tells his orchestra, “in spite of the way you played”) and conceit – when his ex-wife splits with her new boyfriend he comments, “He’s lost a wonderful woman and I know what it’s like – I’ve lost many.” Some of his lines, though, were less easily discerned behind his thick accent.
John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988) was one of the best thrillers of the decade, and as the most sinister of the arch- villain Alan Rickman’s team of lethal terrorists, Godunov uses his blond athleticism to menacing effect as he stalks the hero (Bruce Willis) through the high-rise building that has been commandeered by the killers. Their encounter culminated in a particularly ferocious hand-to- hand struggle, with Godunov ultimately the vanquished.
It is surprising that after this telling role in a cinematic blockbuster, Godunov made only two further screen appearances and in horror films that had only limited release: Willard Carroll’s The Runestone (1992), in which an archaeologist is turned into a monster by a piece of rock, and Waxwork 2: Lost in Time.
Boris Alexander Godunov, dancer, actor: born Riga 28 November 1949; married 1971 Ludmilla Vlasova (marriage dissolved 1982); died Los Angeles c18 May 1995.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Brigitte Auber was born in 1928 in Paris. She has an impressive list of credits on film and television in her native country. She has only one major international film to her credit, “Th Catch A Thief” with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. She had a major role in this movie and it is puzzling that she did not make more British or U.S. films.
Auber began her film career with the leading role in Jacques Becker‘s Rendezvous in July (1949) and was known for roles in numerous French films of the 1950s, including Julien Duvivier‘s Romance Under the Sky of Paris (1951). Auber’s best-known role, and one of her few English-speaking parts, was opposite Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock‘s To Catch a Thief, released in 1955. Auber plays the role of Danielle Foussard. Nearly a decade and a half later, she played the part of elder Françoise in Claude de Givrays miniseries Mauregard (1969) while the young Françoise has been played by another French Hitchcock-actress, Claude Jade from Topaz. She also had a supporting role in film adaptation of The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later(1988) from the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Leonardo DiCaprio played Louis XIV of France and the Man in the Iron Mask, while Auber played the Queen mother’s attendant.
Lilian Montevecchi appeared in some of the popular films in the 1950’s. Among her films are “Moonfleet”, “Me and the Colonel” and “King Creole”. In te 1980’s and 90’s she had a spectacular run on Broadway in a series of musicals. She was born in Paris in 1931 and began her career as a ballet dancer.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Paris-born entertainer Liliane Montevecchi first put on ballet shoes at the age of 9. Nine years later, she became prima ballerina in Roland Petit’s ballet company. Hollywood took a sudden interest in her in the early 1950s along with other foreign-born ballet dancers such as Leslie Caron, Zizi Jeanmaire, and Moira Shearer. Liliane was signed to a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and began appearing in their musicals. However, for the most part, the roles were small and only mildly flavorful, and did nothing to not enough to distinguish her roles which did nothing to abet her film career. Such cinematic ventures as The Glass Slipper (1955) (starring Caron), Daddy Long Legs (1955) (also starring Caron), Moonfleet (1955), Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), The Sad Sack (1957), Me and the Colonel (1958), and the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (1958) came and went without much fanfare for Liliane personally.
It was the live stage that would raise her to legendary status. First, she starred with the Folies Bergere for nine years, traveling all over the world. She then conquered Broadway in the 1980s, winning both Tony and Drama Desk awards for her flashy role in the musical “Nine”, based on Fellini’s art-house film 8½ (1963). She earned a Tony Award nomination several years later with an equally flashy role in the musical “Grand Hotel”. The entertainer, beloved for her delightful mangling of the English language, has appeared in concert at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and has vamped and camped with the best of them in her acclaimed cabaret shows and niteries from here to Timbuktu. These include the semi-autobiographical shows “On the Boulevard” and “Back On the Boulvards.” Still going strong at age 70+, Lilliane Montelecchi has shown time and time again that she is a one-of-a-kind diva who knows no limit.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
2016 Concert Review in “The New York Times” in 2016:
If any entertainer could be described as “Paris incarnate,” it might be Liliane Montevecchi, a quintessential French gamine from another age whose autobiographical one-woman show, “Be My Valentine,” opened on Thursday night at Feinstein’s/54 Below.
Ms. Montevecchi, 83, was a model of proud self-containment in her opening-night performance. Every gesture, from her fingertips to her toes to her bright, metallic smile was a carefully choreographed display of phenomenal agility and disciplined movement. You could spend an entire night studying her hands, which she opened and closed as though wielding fans.
Ms. Montevecchi, who was a star of the Folies Bergère for nine years and before that a prima ballerina with Roland Petit’s Ballets de Paris, can bow all the way to the floor and kick almost to the ceiling. Beyond her specific talents as a dancer and singer, she is an imperial presence.
She spoke of her Hollywood career — she appeared in “The Young Lions”opposite Marlon Brando, the only film star she name-checked, but didn’t like the movies, she said. Most of the other luminaries to whom she paid tribute were music-hall legends like Josephine Baker, Édith Piaf and Mistinguett, whose signature song, “Mon Homme,” (popularized in America by Fanny Brice as “My Man”) she performed in French.
Ms. Montevecchi’s American show business career reached a peak with her performance in the Tommy Tune musical “Nine” (1982) — for which she won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical — and continued with “Grand Hotel,” which had a Gallic-flavored score by Maury Yeston. Accompanied on piano by Ian Herman, she sang one song from each of those shows.
The musical part of the program was a disappointingly predictable rundown of European cabaret songs, including the Mistinguett favorite “Je Cherche un Millionnaire,” later popularized by Eartha Kitt; “Ne Me Quitte Pas”; and the inevitable “La Vie en Rose.” American songs included “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “But Beautiful” and a Cole Porter suite. Acting out Stephen Sondheim’s “I Never Do Anything Twice,” she overemphasized the song’s running double entendre. But her vocals lacked the stamina and confidence of her dancing.
All she really had to do to take command was simply to move.
The above “New York Times” review can also be accessed online here.
New York Times obituary in 2018:
Liliane Montevecchi, the French-born actress, singer and dancer who won a Tony Award for her showstopping role as the producer in “Nine,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Her friend Marc Rosen, who confirmed the death, said the cause was colon cancer.
Ms. Montevecchi was 50 and a runaway from American film and television when she was cast in “Nine,” the 1982 Broadway musical drama about a film director’s midlife crisis, based on the Federico Fellini film “8½.”
The role of the movie producer had been written for a man, but the character was reworked so that Ms. Montevecchi, who didn’t fit anywhere else in the show, could be cast. In “Folies Bergère,” her big number, she reveled in the joys of the good old days of show business, stopped to chat flirtatiously with audience members and ended up gloriously wrapped in a 30-foot-long black feather boa.
Frank Rich’s review in The New York Times described her as “a knockout — a glorious amalgam of music-hall feistiness and balletic grace, with Toulouse-Lautrec shadows about the eyes.” She received the Tony for best featured actress in a musical, beating two of her own “Nine” co-stars, Karen Akers and Anita Morris.
Story continues below advertisement
“Nine” was neither Ms. Montevecchi’s first Broadway show — although the earlier ones had been revues (“La Plume de Ma Tante” in 1958, “Folies Bergère” in 1964) — nor her last. She earned another Tony nomination, for a 1989 musical adaptation of “Grand Hotel,” in which she was Grushinskaya, the high-strung ballerina, nostalgic for her glory days, played by Greta Garbo in the 1932 film.
Later, when she worked in cabaret, Stephen Holden of The Times called her “an imperial presence.”
Liliane Dina Montevecchi was born on Oct. 13, 1932, in Paris, the only child of Franco Montevecchi, an Italian-born painter, and Janine Trinquet Montevecchi, a French-born hat designer. The couple soon divorced.
Liliane began taking ballet lessons when she was 9 or so and appearing onstage soon afterward. At 18, she was in Roland Petit’s company Les Ballets de Paris, where she became a prima ballerina. After she made her film debut in a small role in “Femmes de Paris” (1953), Hollywood called. She did two 1955 films, “The Glass Slipper” and “Daddy Long Legs,” both starring her countrywoman Leslie Caron and featuring Mr. Petit’s choreography.
MGM signed her to a seven-year contract, but American movies largely wasted her. Over the next three years, she appeared in an odd assortment of small roles in seven films, including the war drama “The Young Lions” (1958), with Marlon Brando, in which she played a French escort with strong views about Nazis; the Jerry Lewis comedy “The Sad Sack” (1957), as a saucy, skimpily clad club performer in Morocco; and the Elvis Presley musical drama “King Creole” (1958), as a saucy, skimpily clad club performer in New Orleans.
After a few television roles in series like “77 Sunset Strip” and “Playhouse 90,” she returned to dancing, her first love, joining the Folies-Bergère in Las Vegas in 1964. She worked with that troupe and the Paris company for nine years.
Basking in her new Broadway acclaim, she began her cabaret career in 1982. John S. Wilson of The Times called her first engagement, at Les Mouches in New York, a “brilliant, breathlessly fast-moving act.”
In her solo shows, she sang in both English and French, exuding confidence and style and nailed the double-entendres for decades. She also appeared in an acclaimed 1998 all-star revival of “Follies” at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey; it seemed to be Broadway bound but never transferred.
Ms. Montevecchi, who was said never to have married, is survived by her longtime companion, Claudio Borin, who lives in Italy. “I’m set in my ways, and I’ve lived all my life alone,” she said in a 1982 television-news interview. “I don’t trust people a lot.”
She sometimes told friends about an impulsive wedding in Las Vegas and a marriage that lasted two weeks, but she never revealed the man’s name or provided evidence, they said.
She eventually returned to motion pictures, this time as a character actress. Her last film was “4 Days in France” (2016), as a rural Frenchwoman who gives advice to a lovelorn young gay man. (“Don’t run after people.”) Before that, she appeared in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003) as a diamond magnate’s wife who flirts shamelessly with an advertising executive played by Matthew McConaughey.
Ms. Montevecchi never retired from cabaret performances, appearing at Feinstein’s 54/Below for the last time in 2016. “She didn’t know it was her last engagement,” Steven Minichiello, a close friend, recalled. “She expected to heal and go on forever. She was the master class in stage presence.”
In 2016, Ms. Montevecchi told the Woman Around Town website: “After all these years, it’s not O.K. to just do a show. Because you know more, you want to give more.”
Jacques Bergerac was born in 1927 and was a French actor who later became a business executive with Revlon.
Jacques Bergerac was born in 1927 in Biarritz, France. He was recruited by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios while a law student in Paris at the age of 25.
His last appearance was on an episode of The Doris Day Show in 1969, after which he left show business and became the head of Revlon‘s Paris office and of the Perfumes Balmain company. His younger brother Michel became CEO of Revlon six years later.
He also managed the rugby club Biarritz Olympique from 1980 until 1981.
Bergerac married screen star Ginger Rogers in February 1953, and they divorced in July 1957. In June 1959, he married actress Dorothy Malone in Hong Kong, where she was on location for her 1960 film The Last Voyage. They had daughters Mimi and Diane together, and divorced in December 1964.
He died June 15, 2014, at his home in Anglet, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France.
Marie-France Pisier obituary in “The Guardian” in 2011.
Marie-France Pisier
Marie-France Pisier was born in Vietnam in 1944 and died in 2011. At the age of twelve she came to live in Paris. Her breakthrough role came in 1968 in Francois Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses”. In 1973 she had a critical and popular success with “Celine and Julie Go Boating”. “Cousin, Cousine” in 1975 was another very popular international success. She attempted a Hollywood career with “The Other Side of Midnight” and the television series “Scruples” amongst others . Her U.S. career was not particularly successful and she returned to work in France. She died in 2011.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel’s first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France.
Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut’s enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L’Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine’s stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine’s heart.
Léaud and Pisier were born in the same month and were both 18 when they appeared in the film. Pisier was discovered by a casting director, who had been instructed by Truffaut that: “Jean-Pierre Léaud’s partner must be a real young girl, not a Lolita, not a biker type, nor a little woman. She must be fresh and cheerful. Not too sexy.”
Colette, who treats Antoine like a “buddy”, much to his frustration, runs into him again briefly in Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) and, finally, in the last film of the series, L’Amour en Fuite (Love On the Run, 1979), which she co-wrote. By then Colette was a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, but far more emotionally mature. The film contained what Truffaut called “real flashbacks”, when we see the differences between Pisier in her screen debut and Pisier 17 years and more than 20 films later, when she was midway through a prestigious career. She worked with such auteurs as Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz, appearing in quality French mainstream movies, with a short and unhappy detour to Hollywood.
Pisier was born in French Indochina, now Vietnam, where her father served as colonial governor. She moved to Paris with her family when she was 12. While starting out in films, she completed degrees in jurisprudence and political science at Paris University.
After she had appeared in several mediocre genre films, including thrillers directed by the actor Robert Hossein, Pisier’s career took a more interesting turn. In 1974, she appeared in the most outrageous and amusing sequence in Buñuel’s penultimate film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté (The Phantom of Liberty), where she is among the elegant guests seated on individual lavatories around a table from which they excuse themselves to go and eat in a little room behind a locked door. In the same year, in Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), Rivette’s brilliantly allusive comic meditation on the nature of fiction, she and Bulle Ogier act out, in a stylised and exquisite manner, a creaky melodrama in a mysterious housePisier was cast by the director André Téchiné in several of his early films, including Barocco (1976), for which she won a César award for her supporting role as a prostitute with a baby in tow. She later played Charlotte Brontë, alongside Isabelle Adjani (as Emily) and Isabelle Huppert (as Anne) in Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979).
Her performance as a frivolous, neurotic wife in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin Cousine (1975), a hit in the US, led to her starring role in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), a Hollywood soap opera in which she almost overcame the cliches as a naive French girl who, betrayed by an American pilot, begins to use men for their money and power.
But subsequently, apart from French Postcards (1979), in which, according to the critic Roger Ebert, “Marie-France Pisier, her jet-black hair framing her startling red lipstick, is the kind of dark Gallic woman-of-a-certain-age who knocks your socks off”, she was little seen in English-language movies. Among the rare exceptions was Chanel Solitaire (1981), in which she portrayed the designer Coco Chanel with her usual elegance. She made a splendid Madame Verdurin in Ruiz’s Proust adaptation, Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and was ethereal in the same director’s magical Combat d’Amour en Songe (2000).
More recently, she was an iconic presence in Christophe Honoré’s homage to the French new wave, Dans Paris (2006). Pisier also directed two films, Le Bal du Gouverneur (The Governor’s Party, 1990), starring Kristin Scott Thomas and adapted from Pisier’s own novel about some of her childhood spent in New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Comme un Avion (Like an Airplane, 2002), a family drama based on the death of her own parents.
Pisier was an outspoken defender of women’s rights and legal abortion. She overcame breast cancer in the 1990s. Her first husband was the lawyer Georges Kiejman, with whom she had a son. She is survived by her second husband, Thierry Funck-Brentano, a businessman; her brother, Gilles; and her sister, Evelyne.
• Marie-France Pisier, actor, writer, director, born 10 May 1944; died 24 April 2011
The above “Guaredian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Good looks can be a mixed blessing for an actor. In the case of Louis Jourdan, the romantic star who died on Saint Valentine’s Day aged 93, they guaranteed him a career both in his native France and in Hollywood, but rarely in roles that moved him out of an audience’s comfort zone. A handsome devil to say the least, he was the absolute epitome of the suave, debonair, seductive Frenchman. The camera adored him, a creature of immaculate appearance and masculine finesse.
It was his role as the bon vivant enchanted by Leslie Caron’s flibbertigibbet debutante in Gigi (1958) that made him an international star. The film won nine Oscars and made Jourdan, who sang the title number, Hollywood’s favourite Frenchman. He was cast by producer Arthur Freed when Dirk Bogarde proved unavailable, Freed having delighted in Jourdan’s performance in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) as the louche Prince Dino, a notorious womaniser whose girlfriends become known as “Venice girls” after he takes them to Venice for romantic trysts.
Born in Marseille in 1921 as Louis Robert Gendre, the son of hotelier Henry Gendre, he rubbed shoulders with the glitterati from an early age when his father ran a seaside hotel in Cannes and assisted in the running of an early incarnation of the city’s film festival. He was encouraged by the visiting stars, and although his father’s career moved the family to Turkey and England, the latter destination provided an excellent opportunity to master the English language. Back in France, he studied acting under René Simon at the École Dramatique, and upon graduating, took his mother’s maiden name of Jourdan.
He was spotted on stage in Paris by the screenwriter and director Marc Allégret, a prodigious talent-spotter who could also claim to have discovered Gérard Philipe, Roger Vadim and Michèle Morgan. Allégret gave him work as an assistant camera operator on a drama within a drama school, Entrée des Artistes (The Curtain Rises), in 1938, as preparation for his movie debut the following year in another story of actors finding the line between work and play blurring, Le Corsaire (The Pirate). Adapted from a play by Marcel Achard, the film offered Jourdan the chance to act opposite Charles Boyer, a French star in Hollywood who Jourdan would go on to emulate. It was a hotly anticipated project, but shooting was halted after a month as France mobilised for war, and the film was never completed.
He did get to act opposite another major star, albeit a fading one, Ramon Novarro, in his eventual film debut, La Comédie du Bonheur (The Comedy of Happiness) in 1940, before war put his career on hold.
During the war, his father was a prisoner of the Gestapo, while Jourdan and his brother were active members of the Resistance, printing and distributing leaflets. He refused to appear in films propagandising Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government, a stand which made him rightly cherished when the French film industry rebuilt itself in the post-war years.
He left for Hollywood in 1946 at the invitation of David O Selznick, and made a good first impression as a man of mystery in the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947), a costly affair directed by Hitchcock and starring Gregory Peck. No aspiring movie star could have wished for better company to ride into town with, although the film turned out to be a disappointment. His much better second Hollywood film got him his name above the title and allowed him to add depth to another smouldering lothario: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), co-starring Joan Fontaine, is an affecting study of unrequited love that remains a powerful watch today. It was the work of another European in Hollywood, director Max Ophüls, which perhaps explains the skillful dodging of tuppeny novelette melodrama for delicate emotional exploration.
Louis Jourdan in ‘Gigi’ (Getty)He began to sense the perils of typecasting when appearing as the lover of adulterous Jennifer Jones in Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949), and in an attempt to break free of such roles, returned to France briefly, where he continued to play lovers, but of a slightly different style: the philandering was strictly for fun in Rue de l’Estrapade (1953) for instance, and his features lent themselves well to villainous roles when he played Doris Day’s psychotic husband in Julie (1956). However, he was by his own admission, “a star without a hit” until he surrendered to Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and then Gigi (1958), which overwhelmed his attempts to break free of light romantic leads.
His Gigi co-star, Leslie Caron, remembered that he was “one of the handsomest men in Hollywood, but not comfortable with his image”, a predicament he shared with the aforementioned Dirk Bogarde. He regularly claimed he was “Hollywood’s French cliché”, in parts that involved “mostly cooing in a woman’s ear”, Gigi in particular making him world famous as “a colourless leading man”.
He remained a bankable star in Hollywood following the success of Gigi: he followed it up with another musical, Can-Can (1960), co-starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine, but his most interesting work was generally to be found elsewhere. His Broadway debut, in the lead role for the Billy Rose stage adaptation of André Gide’s novel The Immoralist, at the Royale Theatre in 1954, was a bold undertaking: he not only played a gay man, but worked in between a brittle James Dean and his then lover, the intense Geraldine Page. The performance won him a Donaldson Award for Best Actor.
He made his American television debut starring in the detective series Paris Precinct for ABC in 1955, but it was a medium he fared better with in Britain, where he was occasionally cast much more imaginatively – on one occasion as the persecuting husband in Gaslight, opposite Margaret Leighton, for ITV in 1960, and for Lew Grade in 1975, playing De Villefort to Richard Chamberlain’s Count of Monte Cristo.
One of the most interesting moments in his career came when Philip Saville cast him as the lead in Count Dracula (1977), a weighty BBC dramatisation that remains one of the most faithful imaginings of the source material, coming just after Hammer Films had given up the ghost. Jourdan’s casting surprised the critics, but, speaking to the Radio Times in 1977, Saville explained that he saw Dracula as “a romantic, sexually dashing anti-hero in the tradition of those figures usually dreamed up by women… Rochester, Heathcliff… figures that can overpower a strong heroine, inhuman figures that can’t be civilised.” Ahead of the game in finding romanticism in vampirism, the drama occasionally lacks bite – but Jourdan remains one of the most interesting and original Draculas in screen history.
He was the best thing in Octopussy (1983), an otherwise lousy Bond film which even lacked a memorable theme song, and bowed out with a similarly suave villain in Peter Yates’s Year of the Comet in 1992, the year he retired. Sadly, few of the roles in his final years are much to speak of.
Although his career was plentiful, it was hamstrung by poor timing and monotonous casting. Nevertheless, he was always a pleasure to watch, a naturally appealing performer. Despite his lothario image, he remained married to his childhood sweetheart, Berthe (known by the nickname Quique) for 67 years, until her death last year. They had one son, who fell victim to drug addiction and died in 1981.
Whenever he spoke in interviews of his enduring marriage, his seductive but sincere voice and passionate conviction could, in Ophelia’s words, move the stoniest breast alive, and reminded one that he was a star of the kind that they just don’t make anymore.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..
TCM Overview:
European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973
Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.
When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).
In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.
Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.
In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.
These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.
So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.
“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”
In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.
On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.
Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.
Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.
By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”
In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).
Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.
Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).
In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.
Jackie died in 2015. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).
One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.
Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.
She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.
Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.
• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019
Catherine Deneuve was born in Paris in 1943. Her sister the late Francoise Dorlec was also an actress. She made her debut in a small role in 1957 in “Les Collegiennes”. In 1964 she made “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” which brought her international recognition. She then went on to make “Repulsion” and “Belle de Jour”. She went to Hollywood to make “The April Fools” with Jack Lemmon and “Hustle” with Burt Reynolds. However her Hollywood career was not particularly successful and she returned to Europe. She continued to have great roles in such movies as “The Last Metro” and “Indochine”. Her film career continues to-day.
Audrey Hepburn obituary in “The Independent” by David Shipman in 1993.
After so many drive-in waitresses in movies – it has been a real drought – here is class, somebody who went to school, can spell and possibly play the piano,’ said Billy Wilder. ‘She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it, with the possible exception of Bergman.’ My generation knew Bergman. Garbo we had never seen. Old pictures were not easy to see in the 1950s. Older cinemagoers talked longingly of Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and other enchantresses. From the moment Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday (1953), we knew that we had one of our own.
She was born in Brussels to an English banker and a Dutch baroness – and when the war broke out had been trapped in Arnhem with her mother; there they spent the war years, while Hepburn trained as a dancer.
Curiously, several people recognised Hepburn’s particular magic, but few British producers were interested. The revue producer Cecil Landau saw her in the chorus of a West End musical – High Button Shoes (1948) – and engaged her for Sauce Tartare. He liked her so much that he gave her more to do in a sequel, Sauce Piquant. ‘God’s gift to publicity men is a heart-shattering young woman,’ said Picturegoer, ‘with a style of her own . . .’ The magazine mentioned that some people had been to see her perform a couple of dozen times, and among them was Mario Zampi, who was about to direct Laughter in Paradise (1951) for Associated British.
The company’s casting director was equally enthusiastic, but to no avail. She was cast as a hat-check girl: the studio reluctantly allowed her three lines, as against one in the original script. She was signed to a contract, and loaned to Ealing for a couple of lines in the final scene in Lavender Hill Mob (1951), when Alec Guinness is enjoying his ill-gotten loot in South America.
At this point, the producer-director Mervyn LeRoy was looking for a patrician girl to play the lead in Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest production in years, and he was excited by Hepburn’s test for him. MGM were not, and the role went to Deborah Kerr. But at last Associated British realised that they might have something in this odd little girl, and they made her a vamp in a parlour-room farce, Young Wives’ Tale (1951), starring Joan Greenwood. It is completely forgotten today, but if you can see it you are likely to be beguiled by two of the most individual actresses who ever appeared in films. They had in common voices with cadences which always alighted on the wrong word to emphasise – as did Sullavan, the other Hepburn, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne, even Judy Garland – turning a statement into a question. In a word, they were never ashamed of their vulnerability; they didn’t seem to be able to cope with life – except to laugh at it. Hepburn’s child-like laugh, deep-throated but tentative, was one of her most distinctive qualities.
But, obviously, it wasn’t unique. Jean Simmons also had it. And it was Simmons who inadvertently launched Hepburn’s screen career. After Young Wives’ Tale, Associated British loaned Hepburn to Ealing again, to play the sister of the star, Valentina Cortese, in a muddled spy drama, The Secret People (1951), and then to a French company for a minor B-movie, Monte Carlo Baby (1951). Hepburn was doing a scene in a Monte Carlo hotel lobby, when Colette happened by. Colette was then working with the American producer Gilbert Miller on a dramatisation of her novel Gigi, about an innocent youngster being trained to appeal – sexually – to men. This wasn’t a subject show-business wanted to know much about. It wasn’t something Hepburn seemed to know about when she played the role on Broadway in 1951.
Meanwhile, contractual obligations prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday, and Hepburn was successfully tested. The property had been brought to Paramount by Frank Capra and when he left it was inherited by another leading director, William Wyler. It was not a likely subject for either of them but then, like many of our favourite movies – All About Eve, Casablanca – there is no other like it; it resists imitation: the innocent alone in the big city. The innocent is the princess of an unnamed European country who escapes from the embassy to see Rome incognito. She is recognised by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who sees in her a good news-story and doesn’t reckon on falling in love.
She doesn’t know that he’s a reporter till they are introduced formally at a reception, when by a flicker of an eyelid he indicates that he won’t be filing the story. Peck was not the most adroit of light comedians and the direction was rather academic: but Hepburn’s sheer joy at being free and in love was wonderful to experience. You could never forget her eating an ice- cream on the Spanish Steps or putting her hand in the mouth of the stone lion at Tivoli.
The acclaim that greeted Hepburn was instantaneous and enormous – to be matched only a year later by that for Grace Kelly in what became their decade. Simmons, whom she had never met, telephoned to say, ‘Although I wanted to hate you, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t have been half as good. You were wonderful.’ Hepburn was judged the year’s best actress by the New York critics, by the readers of Picturegoer and by the voters of the Motion Picture Academy. Paramount had Hollywood’s brightest new star – only it didn’t: she was under contract to Associated British, which came to a lucrative agreement by which Paramount had exclusive rights to her services.
Billy Wilder directed her in Sabrina (1954), in which she was the chauffeur’s daughter, moving from ugly duckling to glamour, which was a formula followed in several subsequent movies. The plot had her loved by two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart got her at the end, establishing another pattern to follow, in which she was wooed by men twice her age: by Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Paris fashions and the Gershwins’ music; by Gary Cooper in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris again and a rather vulgar remake of Canner’s delicate Ariane; and Cary Grant in Donen’s Charade (1963), Paris yet again and Hitchcockian situations.
You could understand why these actors took the risk of being described as cradle-snatchers. Astaire said: ‘This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey and I wasn’t missing it. Period.’ Leonard Gershe, who wrote Funny Face, described her as a joy to work with, ‘as professional as she was unpretentious’. Hollywood’s best directors also clamoured to work with her. King Vidor said that she was the only possible choice to play Natasha in the expensive Italo-American War and Peace (1956), causing William Whitebait in the New Statesman to observe, ‘She is beautifully, entrancingly alive, and I for one, when I next come to read (the book), shall see her where I read Natasha.’ But Tolstoy had done the job for him: physically, temperamentally Hepburn was Natasha.
About this time she might have played another literary heroine. James Mason knew that he would make a superb Mr Rochester, but 20th Century-Fox would only proceed with the project if he could persuade Hepburn to play Jane. He didn’t even try. As he explained: ‘Jane Eyre is a little mouse and Audrey is a head-turner. In any room where Audrey Hepburn sits, no matter what her make- up is, people will turn and look at her because she’s so beautiful.’ Of the many films she turned down the most interesting are MGM’s musicalised Gigi, in her old stage role (and the studio was prepared to pay her far more than Leslie Caron, who was under contract, and who did eventually play the role), and The Diary of Anne Frank, George Stevens’s version of the Broadway dramatisation. She said that that would have been too painful after her own experience of the Occupation (in the event the role was so disastrously cast that the film failed both artistically and commercially).
At the same time Hepburn accepted another difficult subject, with another fine director, The Nun’s Story, for Fred Zinnemann. Kathryn Hulme’s novel was also based on fact, about a novice who finds, in the end, that she doesn’t have enough faith to continue. The film remains Hollywood’s best attempt at playing Church, both because it regards it with respect and not piety, yet at the same time allowing us to make our own decisions about the dottiness of the convent system. She held her own against the formidable opposition of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, both playing Mothers Superior with closed minds – and that was partly because the gentle Zinnemann was nevertheless able to blend their different acting styles, and partly because of Hepburn’s innate instinct for what the camera would allow her to do. Despite her voice mannerisms, here at a minimum, Hepburn was the one star of her generation to suggest intelligence and dignity – which is to say qualities which people, as opposed to actresses, have. Grace, beauty and the sine qua non of stardom made her as rewarding to watch as Garbo, and she can’t disguise them in playing this ordinary girl; but she also has gravity.
She was touching as Burt Lancaster’s half-breed sister in John Huston’s huge, vasty western The Unforgiven (1960), but Blake Edwards allowed the latent artifice of her screen persona to surface as Holly Golightly in his film of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Capote described the result as ‘a mawkish Valentine to Audrey Hepburn’ and George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay, criticised her for refusing to convey the fact that Holly was a tramp with no morals or principles. No one else seemed to mind.
She had committed herself to the film only after Marilyn Monroe had turned it down, and when there was an impasse with Alfred Hitchcock over No Bail for the Judge. He was desperate to work with her and had spent dollars 200,000 in preparation, when she had second thoughts about a scene in which she was dragged into a London park to be raped. Furious, Hitchcock abandoned the picture rather than go ahead with another actress.
Hepburn was a controversial choice to play Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964). Warners had paid a record sum of dollars 5.5m for the screen rights to the Lerner and Loewe musical version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Everyone agreed that its extraordinary success was due to the starring trio of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. The last of these was the most expendable, but Jack Warner decided to go with Holloway when James Cagney wisely declined to come out of retirement to play Doolittle. No leading star was prepared to risk a comparison with Harrison’s definitive Higgins (‘Not only will I not play it,’ said Cary Grant, ‘I won’t even go and see it if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it’) which meant Andrews had to be replaced by a solid box-office attraction.
Warners had recently released The Music Man with its Broadway star Robert Preston, but the film’s reception was so spotty that they had not opened it in territories where he was an unknown quality. The irony of the My Fair Lady situation was that, as filming was under way, word was coming from the Disney studio that Andrews was sensational in Mary Poppins. She got an Oscar for it; Harrison got one for My Fair Lady, presented by Hepburn, and was thus photographed with his two Elizas. That Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed did not help her performance (her non-singing voice had done charmingly by the songs in Funny Face), but she brought a street-wise cunning to the role that Andrews lacked. This may not have been what Shaw intended, but George Cukor, who directed, observed that at the end of the film Hepburn fitted Shaw’s own description of Eliza as ‘dangerously beautiful’.
She made only two more successful films: Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), with Albert Finney, a study of a disintegrating marriage written by Frederic Raphael, and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), a thriller about a blind girl terrorised by some thugs because they thought there were some drugs stashed away in her apartment. Mention should be made of two other movies, because they were directed by Wyler: How to Steal a Million (1966), a comedy with Peter O’Toole, and The Children’s Hour (1962), a remake of his own These Three. The original Broadway play hinged on a lie told by a child, that two of her teachers have an unnatural affection for each other. The censor would not permit that in 1936, so the plot of the film depended on the child accusing one teacher of filching the other’s fiance. Wyler’s decision to remake the picture was to restore the lesbian element, but the result was flat, despite the fact that Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were infinitely better actresses than Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, the stars of the 1936 version.
At the height of her career Hepburn made only one out-and-out stinker, Green Mansions, with Anthony Perkins. It may be that WH Hudson’s novel about Rima the Bird Girl is unfilmable (MGM had started shooting one a few years earlier before giving up), but matters here were made worse by the stodgy direction by Mel Ferrer, at that time married to Hepburn. They had met while appearing in Giraudoux’s Ondine in New York in 1954, and he accompanied her to Italy, to play Prince Andrei in War and Peace. When the marriage broke up in 1968 she married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and announced that a career and marriage were incompatible; so she only intended to film again if she could do so near her homes in Rome and Switzerland.
She came out of retirement five times, and only the first time was worthwhile: to play an ageing Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). She was an industrial heiress in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, which was so badly received that she admitted that she had done it because she liked the director, Terence Young. She added that she wanted to go out on a good one – and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed certainly didn’t provide it. Nobody laughed, including Time-Life, who financed it and dropped it after a few test showings. In 1987 she made a telemovie, Love Among Thieves, and although she herself was praised the press liked neither it nor her co-star, Robert Wagner. In 1989 she played a small role in Always, Steven Spielberg’s remake of A Guy Named Joe, in the role done in the original by Lionel Barrymore as an emissary of the Almighty. She was realistic enough to recognise that there were few meaty roles for actresses of her age – and with Spielberg’s box-office record she hoped to be in a success. She was wrong again.
3rd September 1955: British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 68 No 10 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
She was by now spending most of her time working voluntarily for Unicef and giving interviews to explain what she was doing and what was needed. Unlike some stars whose identification with charities always looked suspicious, as if they wanted to advance their careers, it was clear that in this case there was no career and she wanted to find something useful to do. She also appeared frequently at movie functions, to be awarded lifetime achievement awards or make the special presentation at the end of the evening. Many people had expected her to age badly, because she had been so scrawny as a young woman. The reverse was the case – for she still possessed in middle age what she had always had: radiance, dignity and, above all, style. This last quality may be summed up by a famous exchange of the 1950s, when her clothes were designed by one of the most celebrated couturiers in Paris. ‘Just think what Givenchy has done for Audrey Hepburn.’ ‘No, just think what Audrey Hepburn has done for Givenchy.’
