Charles Boyer

In writing primarily about Hollywood's Golden Age I have attempted to include all the notables of that decades-long period.  It's taken me 11 years to do a piece on Charles Boyer and he certainly deserves inclusion here.  I admit, year by year, I have put it off.  With the exception of Fanny (1961), I have also never written about any of his films.  

I didn't dislike him... exactly.  Maybe when I was young I did because I could never understand him.  I loved how he sounded, Francophile that I was and am, but it was all too garbled for my young years.  That, of course, improved as I saw his films and got accustomed to it but I never  understood his enormous appeal.  As a contrast, I was never wacky over Clark Gable either but I did understand his appeal.  What did Boyer have that made the female sex pop their pearls?

Don't look for the answer here.  All these years later I still don't get it.  For American women, at least, I have to assume that it's also the French thing... or the foreign thing... or the different-from-me thing.  He seemed very old-world, a little dull, a limited acting range, not handsome, no sex appeal and always, always in a suit.   While I never particularly cared for him as a leading man, I found him to be a rather enchanting character actor.  So while it took me years to warm to him, I finally did.  I think he made some good films... perhaps 10.    

I honor him for being a good husband, a very good one, as I see it.  He was married only once, to his beloved Pat, and he was a very devoted husband.  She meant everything to him.  I think the end of their lives is deeply touching and unforgettable.

Charles Boyer was born in 1899 in Figeac, Lot, France to a farm machinery dealer and his wife.  From his earliest years he loved pretending that he was other people.  By the time he was 7 he was getting small and then larger parts in school plays.  By 12 he was using his father's granary as a theater and he learned passages of long plays and even performed his own works. 

During WWI he entertained soldiers with comedy skits while working as a hospital orderly.  He briefly attended the Sorbonne, working toward a degree in philosophy.   His time there was interrupted by 18 months of military service, after which he enrolled at the Paris Conservatory to complete his education and study acting formally.

His ability to learn lines quickly allowed him to replace an actor on the stage and that led to more acting work and a chance to appear in silent films.  He became a well-respected stage actor but was considered too unphotogenic for movies. 

Hollywood didn't share that view.  When he first arrived in 1930, he spent most of his time yoyoing between Paramount and MGM working with such luminaries as Garbo, Harlow, Hepburn, Colbert and Young. It helped established him as a French heartthrob while women swooned and fanned themselves.   They loved his debonair manner while his low voice was considered sexy and his wardrobe was impeccable.  His personality was lowkey and he usually kept his emotions in check.  There always seemed to be a mystery about him.

In 1931 MGM gave him top billing in a film called Big House.  It was filmed in French and English.   Most of his movies of the early thirties were not huge moneymakers and today are virtually unknown.  His career got some notice in 1937 when he costarred with Jean Arthur in the popular History Is Made at Night.   For decades he would occasionally return to France to make a film that would rarely make it stateside.

He married British actress Pat Paterson in 1934.  It would be his only marriage.  They were largely a private couple who stayed out of the spotlight.  Neither of them ever particularly warmed to Los Angeles.  The couple would have a son, Michael, in 1943. 

In 1937 he received his first Oscar nomination for playing Napoleon opposite Garbo in Conquest.

Romancing Hedy Lamarr in Algiers

Certainly one of the films Boyer is best known for is Algiers (1938) where he romances Hedy Lamarr and plays Pepe Le Moko,  a jewel thief on the run.  The character and his voice were already world-famous when animator Chuck Jones parodied it by introducing the romantic skunk, Pepe Le Pew, in 1945. 

Algiers features, of course, the Casbah and Boyer has always been credited with saying (he'd say haunted by) the line come with me to the Casbah.   Later in life he gave an interview in which he said, In America, when you have an accent, in the mind of the people they associate you with kissing hands and being gallant.  I think that has harmed me just as it has harmed me to be followed and plagued by a line I never said.  

He received his second Oscar nomination for Algiers.  It was his second best actor nod in two years.  Both times he lost to Spencer Tracy.

By the way, Boyer wore a toupee in all of his films until he reached old age.  He was bald by 22 years of age.  When he wasn't working, he never wore it, even in public.

With Irene Dunne in Love Affair

He said that Love Affair (1939), the first of his three films with Irene Dunne, was his favorite of all his films.  Leo McCarey directed the romantic weepie about a French playboy and an American former nightclub singer who fall in love aboard a ship and later mistakenly lose track of one another.  The format was so popular that McCarey directed his own remake in 1957 with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and retitled it An Affair to Remember.

All This and Heaven Too (1940) provided the fascinating coupling of Boyer and Bette Davis.  They played off one another so well.  She is a governess to a French royal couple's children, brought on chiefly to educate them.  The couple's marriage is crumbling and the wife takes too much pleasure in tormenting the governess.  The acting, to include Barbara O'Neil as the wife, is just what we've come to expect from those big stars of the day.  It's a drama that keeps one engaged and a tender romance for sighing.

Make no mistake, he was already a star and an international one as well.   He continued to play opposite most of the famous actresses of the day.  The forties were his decade.  And the hits just kept on comin'.   

Back Street (1941) was a screaming success with the public and critics alike.  It had been filmed in 1932 with Irene Dunne and John Boles and would be again in 1961 with Susan Hayward and John Gavin.  This version, costarring Margaret Sullavan, is generally considered the best (most romantic) of the three.  Fannie Hurst's story of a woman's love for a married man always seemed to pull out the tears.

Boyer charmed them again in the romantic drama Hold Back the Dawn (1941).  Directed by Mitch Leisen and written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, it is the story of a Romanian gigolo who marries an American schoolteacher in Mexico so he can gain entry to the U.S.  With these writers, it's all far more complex than this simple overview.  It's a role tailor-made for the actor and Olivia de Havilland and Paulette Goddard lend great support. 

If Boyer wasn't all that enamored of Los Angeles, he certainly felt different about the U.S. and he became a citizen in 1942.

I saw The Constant Nymph (1943) for the first time a couple of years ago and couldn't understand how I'd missed it.  A woman (Alexis Smith) becomes consumed with jealousy over the attention her husband (Boyer) pays to her young cousin (Joan Fontaine).  Fontaine was a little too seasoned to be playing a 14-year old but one gets through it to see all these fine actors go through their paces.  Considering all the leading men she worked with, Fontaine said Boyer was her favorite.

Terrorizing Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

The best role he ever had was as the scheming husband to poor Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944).  Having Boyer as a bad guy was just what he should have been doing.  He is mesmerizing in the role.  I can never get it through my head that George Cukor directed this and handled it so well.  It always seems like a Hitchcock flick to me due to the suspense element.  Bergman won an Oscar and Boyer was nominated for the third time.  In her autobiography the acclaimed actress said Boyer was the most intelligent actor she ever worked with and one of the nicest.

Pat Boyer gave birth to their son while her husband worked on Gaslight.  They had been trying to have a baby for years.  The child came early and when Boyer was called on the set and told he was a father, he broke down and cried.

Everyone should see at least one Ernst Lubitsch film.  Both a writer and a director, his comedies were a scream.  He took serious subjects and spiced them up with elegance, style and cynicism.  He was so good at it and it became so recognizable that it was called The Lubitsch Touch.

One such Lubitsch comedy, although not his best, is Cluny Brown (1946) about a spirited parlor maid who begins a friendship and then a romance with a Czech refugee who is staying in the home in which she works.  It is a satire on the smugness of  British high society.  It is fun seeing Jennifer Jones in a comedy.

A Woman's Vengeance (1948) is a film noir that could have been better.  The story of a man suspected of his shrewish wife's murder and immediate marriage to a young mistress goes too far afield with its many twists and turns.  Boyer and Ann Blyth are not well-matched but Jessica Tandy, Cedric Hardwicke and Mildred Natwick are worth your taking a look.  Reuniting with Bergman the same year for Arch of Triumph  was a big mistake.

While he was in a noir mood, he made The 13th Letter (1951) for Otto Preminger alongside Linda Darnell and Michael Rennie.  It concerns citizens in a small village who receive letters about their adulterous relationships.  Unfortunately it is less a noir than a so-so mystery.  It was telling that Boyer was second-billed to Darnell whose own career was slipping.

For whatever reasons, Boyer's American career was also slipping.  By 1950 he was 51 years and apparently it was time to work in character parts and give up the romantic leading man roles although there were a few still open to him in France.  He was a fine character actor.

Always happiest with family

He  got extremely good notices for the French film, The Earrings of Madame de (1953).  It concerns a wife who sells some expensive earrings her husband has given her to cover a debt.  Of course it sets in motion a series of events that come back to bite her in the earlobes.   It has its fantastical moments but one would be hard-pressed to find a more elegant film.  Boyer was high as a kite over the attention he was getting and the same could be said for Danielle Darrieux as his wife.  (She had also been his leading lady in 1936's Mayerling.)

During the 50s his movie work was rare and rather lackluster.  He kept busy on Broadway and turned almost exclusively to television, starring in two popular series.  The first, from 1952-56, was Four Star Playhouse where he, Dick Powell, David Niven and Ida Lupino alternated as hosts.

The Buccaneer (1958) didn't do much for Boyer's or Yul Brynner's or Claire Bloom's or Inger Stevens's careers but it is glamorous and occasionally exciting.  Highly-fictionalized in its depiction of pirate Jean Lafitte helping Americans in the Battle of New Orleans, the Anthony Quinn-directed film had serious continuity issues. 

With "son" Horst Buchholz in Fanny

My favorite Boyer film (although Gaslight, as stated, is my favorite Boyer role) is Fanny (1961) with Leslie Caron and Horst Buchholz as star-crossed lovers in early 20th century Marseilles.  Boyer copped his final Oscar nomination for best actor playing Buchholz's critical father.  It is a lovely romantic story that we reviewed earlier.  

A return to television in 1964 came with The Rogues , another anthology, host-shifting series, with Niven again and Gig Young.  

His son Michael died in 1965 at age 21 from suicide.  He was playing Russian Roulette because he was despondent over a breakup with his girlfriend.  Not unexpectedly, life was never the same for Boyer.

In the last 10 years of his life, his films weren't that good.  There were  exceptions... small roles in a pair of comedies... 1966's How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole and Barefoot in the Park (1967) with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.  You'd be advised to forget A Very Special Favor, Casino Royale, The Day the Hot Line Got Hot and three mega-disasters, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Lost Horizon and his final movie, A Matter of Time (another reunion with Bergman).

In the mid-1970s Boyer suggested to Pat that they both have physicals because it had been a while.   He was privately told that she had inoperable colon and liver cancer and was given a year to live.  While badly shaken to hear the news, he put on a brave front as he became even more attentive than he'd always been.  He also never told her she was going to die.  He elected to be her only caregiver.  As she became a little sicker, he moved them to Paradise Valley, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb, saying it would be better for their mutual health.   

On August 24, 1978 Boyer was holding her hand at 3 a.m. when she passed away.   He was inconsolable, saying that (after 44 years) he could not live without her.  Two days later Boyer died from an overdose of Seconal at a friend's Scottsdale, Arizona home.   He was two days away from his 79th birthday.

I have never spent such a long time thinking about Charles Boyer and now that I have, I acknowledge that he seemed to be a decent man.  Family meant the most to him but so did honor, kindness, self-respect, the work ethic.  For a Hollywood star of those heady times, he seemed downright normal.   The promise of romance has always been one of the movies' great draws and Boyer made his mark in those roles.   He certainly did it well enough to capture four Oscar nominations and be in the thick of the greatest explosion of actors and stars during Hollywood's Golden Age.