Did you know Claudette Colbert was French? She first acted in the states and all but a couple of her films are American. Leslie Caron's also first acted in an American film but she has appeared in many international films. Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve only made a few American films. Capucine flirted with some American fame in the early 60's. Juliette Binoche and Marion Cotillard are contemporary Parisian-born stars who work all over the world and are Oscar winners to boot.
I didn't include Brigitte Bardot, world-famous as she was, because she not only never made an American film, to my knowledge she never made a European film even partly in America.
In the late forties and early fifties, four Frenchwomen, at various stages of their careers in their homeland, arrived on American shores to knock 'em dead. Unlike those in the previous paragraph, none succeeded. And the first two would probably have been horrified to be mentioned in the same posting as the last two. Most of you probably won't know any of the four although one name or another may be familiar to you. Here's a chance to brush up... or not.
Danielle Darrieux
She was good-looking and could act and sing and dance with equal aplomb and it came to her early in life as she had a persevering need to express herself. A producer spotted her at an audition and offered her a five-year contract and she was on her way. The 1936 French film, Mayerling, opposite Charles Boyer, brought her to stardom.
Her first husband, French director Henri Decoin, suggested she try Hollywood. She signed the required seven-year contract with Universal and made the funny The Rage of Paris opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr. about a young woman down on her luck looking to find a wealthy husband. She did not like the Hollywood experience at all and walked out on her contract and returned to Paris.
She was lured back to Hollywood in the early 50's for some inexplicable reason to play Jane Powell's mother in Rich, Young and Pretty. Powell's Texas rancher father (Wendell Corey) takes her to Paris where he hopes they can avoid meeting the mother she never knew, the result of a brief encounter. If it sounds daring for 1951, it wasn't. 5 Fingers (1952) is a clever film noir about a valet to a British ambassador who sells secrets to the Germans during WWII. Darrieux, James Mason and Michael Rennie are nothing short of perfection.
She got great notices for such European films as The Earrings of Madame De and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Alexander the Great (as Richard Burton's mother) was her final American film. She was Catherine Deneuve's mother in both The Young Girls of Rochefort and 8 Women (the latter a rare foreign-language film I admire and own). She was highly-regarded in her home country. She died in 2017 at age 100.
Micheline Presle
At 96 she is the only one of this group still living and I was so drawn to her in the few films I've seen. There was something playfully aristocratic about her. It's a shame she didn't make more American films but her short time here was anything but enjoyable.
She wanted to be an actress from as early as she could remember. When she made her film debut at 15, she was honored as the best newcomer in France. She was sensational as a nurse who falls in love with a teenager in 1947's Devil in the Flesh which brought her to the attention of American filmmakers. Still, not much happened until she married American actor-director William Marshall and with him she moved to Hollywood.
Known as Micheline Prelle for most of her time in Hollywood, she was signed to play opposite John Garfield in Under My Skin (1950) who played a jockey harassed by mobsters after he agrees to throw a race and then reneges. The following year she was vibrant opposite Tyrone Power in An American Guerrilla in the Philippines, a good war film that deserved a better following. After being directed by her husband opposite Errol Flynn in the unsuccessful Adventures of Captain Fabian, she returned to France, divorced her husband in 1955 and never remarried.
She continued making European movies, the best is arguably Blind Date in 1959 with Hardy Kruger and Stanley Baker and for some unknown reason she returned to Hollywood to play Sandra Dee's mother in the comedy If a Man Answers (1962) and was the best thing about it. The following year she was one of the Nobel winners in The Prize with Paul Newman. She has not returned to American films but has made scores of films in France and elsewhere.
Denise Darcel
Neither of these last two were ever considered to be much in the acting department and both elected to stay in America and promote themselves more as sexy starlets than actresses. Darcel was a cabaret singer when she was voted the Most Beautiful Girl in France, which attracted the attention of Hollywood talent scouts who thought she'd be ideally sexy to satisfy American tastes in foreign beauties.
Though she came to the U.S. as the wife of a American army captain, she soon put him on permanent furlough and over the years would rack up four more husbands. She appeared on Broadway in some musical revues and took the spotlight as the only femme in a good war film, Battleground (1949). Her flagrant sex appeal was undeniable but her acting was compromised by a strong, nearly unintelligible French accent. Instead of trying to be better at English, she seemed to thrive on being misunderstood.
She was most effective opposite Lex Barker in Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950) and worked alongside Robert Taylor in Westward the Women (1951), Glenn Ford in Young Man with Ideas (1952) and gave Esther Williams some trouble in Dangerous When Wet (1953). By far her best role was opposite Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper in the exciting Vera Cruz (1954). She was a countess that a gang of adventurers is assigned to protect on a journey during the Mexican Revolution. As fine as she was in her best movie, her film career was virtually over.
She did some television but took up stripping for a few years. After a few nightclub gigs, she got a job hosting a TV game show. During most of these years she was romantically linked with black singer Billy Eckstine, a bold move for the time and the death knell to what career she had left. She was unheard of for years until she was arrested for shoplifting in Florida. In 2009 after a showing of her film, Flame of Calcutta, she announced to the audience I'm back. She wasn't. She slid back into obscurity until her death two years later at age 86.
Corinne Calvet
She left Paris for Hollywood about the same as Darcel. She was on the radio in Paris and did a couple of films and did some stage work. She had apparently not entertained acting until she met French heartthrob Jean Marais who told her she'd be a natural. Once in Hollywood, she was put under contract to Paramount who wanted to jump in on the European actress craze.
She would one day write an autobiography tellingly titled Has Corinne Been a Good Girl? You probably haven't read it and you know the answer. She barely got her feet wet when Paramount opted to showcase her as a glamour girl. Even though she would later claim that Paramount put her in mediocre movies where her talent failed to shine, it was apparent that she cared more about her nightclub appearances and getting her name in the papers for frequently those very things that are career-killing.
She made Rope of Sand (1949), a so-so adventure film that takes place largely in a desert but is far more famous for two men who were in it. One was the star, Burt Lancaster, who engaged in a rough and tumble physical relationship with Calvet that made all the papers, and handsome neophyte actor John Bromfield, who was ordered by the studio to marry her. That can only mean one thing. She appeared in two of director John Ford's lesser films, When Willie Comes Marching Home and What Price Glory. She made two with Rory Calhoun with whom she also had an affair that ended with him firing a gun at her. Her most viewed film is clearly 1954's The Far Country, one of Jimmy Stewart's least successful westerns.
After a much publicized suicide attempt in 1954, she more or less faded from American films. She did some television and then returned to France in the hope of reigniting her movie career. When that failed, she became a hypnotherapist, eventually returning to Southern California. It's said that a number of lawsuits kept her away from films but it's more likely that her infamous ego was the main culprit. She died in 2001 at age 76.
Next posting:
The directors
You forgot Michelle Morgan, who made a Sinatra movie in the 40s and MGM's The Vintage in the 50s...
ReplyDeleteI know I left her out, Paul, although not from forgetfulness. I left her out because I think she is even less known to American readers than the four I did choose although in hindsight I could have at least mentioned her in the second paragraph. Now, we'll let your comments stand in for what I didn't do. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteNice blog, I once had the opportunity to talk to Denise Darcel in the early 2010s (a nice funny woman)
ReplyDelete