TAINA ELG (WIKIPEDIA)
Taina Elg is one of the few actresses who hail from Finland to star in Hollywood films. She was born in Helsinki in 1930. She trained originally as a ballet dancer. She joined the Sadler Welles Ballet company in London. She was noticed by an American film producer and offered a Hollywood contract. Her first U.S. film was “The Prodigal” with Edmund Purdom and Lana Turner in 1955. She made a number of other films for MGM including “Gaby” and “Diane”. She went on to star with Kay Kendall, Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor in “Les Girls” amusical with songs by Cole Porter. She then went to Britain to film the remake of “The 39 Steps” with Kenneth More. Her film career waned somewhat during the early 1960’s and she acted more frequently on stage and on television. Her son is the famous jazz guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim. Interview with Taina Elg on “Finland Center” website
The Times obituary:
When Taina Elg first arrived in the United States in 1954, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio launched a newspaper campaign to find a new name for the Finnish ballerina. Readers were offered the chance to win a $25,000 cash prize and a six-room house by sending in more palatable suggestions — along with old labels from corned beef hash and devilled ham (the draw had been sponsored by the meat product company Armour Star). Nothing came of it but as Elg’s career in Hollywood matured, newspapers helpfully continued to point out that her first name rhymed with “Dinah”.
For many years she was, as the Times-Tribune reported, Hollywood’s “only Finn of note”, but in some ways Elg had arrived on the scene too late. Her great talent was as a dancer — a trained ballerina, she had danced with Sadler’s Wells — but when her big break came, in the form of the 1957 Cole Porter musical film Les Girls, big-budget musicals were on the wane.
However ill-timed, Les Girls would ensure Elg a place in the canon and playing Angèle Ducros, one of three cabaret dancers who cattily vie for the attention of their caddish troupe leader, Barry, played by Gene Kelly, was the ideal entrée. Years later the girls get embroiled in a lawsuit, started by the capricious Angèle, after one of them publishes a damning memoir detailing Angèle’s attempted suicide after the end of her affair with Barry
Based on a dancer’s memories of her time in the Folies Bergère in Paris, the musical — a “lively pot-pourri of gossip and slander”, according to The New York Times — gave Elg the chance to sing some of Cole Porter’s best-known songs, including Ca c’est l’amour, which she sings to Kelly in a rowboat, and the burlesque number Ladies in Waiting, which she performed in Louis XV drag.
Les Girls won best picture at the Golden Globes and best actress for Elg, shared with her co-star Kay Kendall, but it marked an end of sorts for many of its troubadours. It was to be Cole Porter’s final film score and the last musical either Kelly or the producer Sol Siegel made. And if Elg thought it her big break, she was to be bitterly disappointed. She left MGM two years later. “When I asked for a release from my contract,” she said, “I think they were as relieved as I was. There were only 14 actors still there full-time. When I’d signed a few years earlier, there had been between 40 and 50.
Taina Elisabeth Elg was born in Helsinki in 1930. Her Russian mother, Helena Doroumova, was a gifted pianist, as was her father, Ake Elg, who died in the Second World War. The family moved to Switzerland then Canada. When they returned to Helsinki after the war, Taina continued to nurture her childhood passion for dancing and singing and was invited to join the Finnish National Ballet. She had been there for six years when she was cast in her first film, about a country girl who moves to town to become a “lady”, has a child with the son of the professor with whom she lodges and becomes a prostitute
For the next few years Elg “fanatically” dedicated herself to ballet and as her international reputation grew, she joined Sadler’s Wells in London and the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in Paris. During one performance she was spotted by the American film producer Edwin H Knopf, brother of the publisher Alfred, and in the wake of the success of her fellow Scandinavian Anita Ekberg she was offered a seven-year contract with MGM. At first Elg refused: she was engaged to Carl Björkenheim, who was working in his family’s shipping firm in Finland, and wanted to stay.
A few months later she got a letter from Knopf asking her to reconsider. Her now-husband agreed to go with her. “We thought, why not?” she recalled. “We were young and full of adventurous spirit.” In America the young couple were introduced to the glitterati of Hollywood at “wonderful parties”, including one for MGM’s 30th anniversary in which the newest recruit posed for a photograph with the oldest, Lionel Barrymore. Yet Elg’s experience of Hollywood was far tamer than many. “I can’t tell you any lurid stories because I was never involved in any of them,” she said in a later interview. “I was under contract, I was married, I was very safe at MGM and I had lovely friends. We used to go skiing all the time and we swam and played tennis and did javelin throwing.”
Her debut role was as Elissa in The Prodigal (1955). She had little film experience and was “absolutely mortified to be in this big production with Louis Calhern and Lana Turner and Walter Hampden”, she recalled. “Here I was, left to my own devices. I was really shaking in my shoes but I pretended like I had done it all my life and got a few technical pointers from Edmund [Purdom)
Her most prominent role was that of a schoolteacher in the classic The 39 Steps(1959), based on the John Buchan thriller and co-starring Kenneth Moore. A gifted linguist, she was often cast in foreign roles — as a French cabaret singer in Les Girls, a French farm worker alongside Glenn Ford in Imitation General (1958) and a German missionary’s daughter in the adventure film Watusi (1959) — but by the Sixties her Hollywood career was in decline and she began to focus on television projects, foreign pictures and theatre, appearing in musicals such as Irma La Douce, West Side Story — two years before the film was released — and The Sound of Music. “It’s a pity that I didn’t happen to have been born ten years earlier so I could have had more chances of improving and being in more films,” she said
The rest of her career featured musicals such as Sondheim’s A Little Night Music(1973) and Frank Loesser’s revival of Where’s Charley? (1974), for which she earned a Tony nomination, and film credits including Hercules in New Yorkstarring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liebestraum and The Mirror has Two Faces, a 1996 rom-com starring Barbra Streisand. Yet playing the understudy to Julie Christie’s Yelena in Uncle Vanya in 1973 seemed to sum up some of the disappointments of her career. “I didn’t get a chance to go on and play it as Julie was in excellent health,” she said.
She divorced Björkenheim not long after arriving in the US. She is survived by their son, Raoul, a jazz guitarist. Her second husband, Rocco Caporale, an Italian professor of sociology, predeceased her in 2008. After his death she left New York and returned to Helsinki, where she enjoyed watching plays and films, though rarely her own.
Despite the occasional twinge of regret, in interviews she appeared gentle and good-humoured. She would know when she had made it, she once said, when people no longer tripped over her name. It is a sad irony that this was often the case.
Taina Elg, actress, was born on March 9, 1930. She died on May 15, 2025, age
Finland’s first (and arguably only) genuine Hollywood movie star, Taina Elg, has died at the age of 95, newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported on Monday.
Elg died at a nursing home in Helsinki on 15 May, HS said.
The future star was born in Helsinki in 1930 and started her Hollywood career in the 1950s. She studied ballet and first went abroad to find work as a dancer, before an injury cut that career short.
She was then invited to audition as an actor in Hollywood, and ended up signing a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios when she was just over the age of 20. At the time, MGM was one of the most powerful studios in Hollywood.
As the new technology of television was starting to draw audiences away from the cinema, MGM started to make big musicals, and Elg landed her biggest role in one of them.
Released in 1957 and directed by George Cukor, the musical comedy Les Girls starred Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall alongside Elg. The legendary Cole Porter was behind the film’s music and lyrics
The film won an Academy Award for best costume design and was also nominated in two other categories.
Elg won a Golden Globe award for that film, and also won a Golden Globe in the ‘Female Foreign Newcomer’ category in 1957 for her work in the film Gaby.
In an interview in the early 1990s, Elg told Yle how she became friends with Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner, saying the latter taught her a lot about acting on the big screen.
Elg’s Hollywood success made her a superstar back home, and her visits to Finland became major media events in the 1950s
After a career in Hollywood that lasted until the end of the 1950s, Elg moved to New York City. There, in the 1960s, she appeared in Broadway musicals and also had a starring role in the western TV series Wagon Train.
Her career in theatre, film and television continued until the 1990s
The Guardian obituary in 2025.
Asked how she would know when she had hit the big time, the beguiling actor Taina Elg, who has died aged 95, said: “When people no longer trip over my name.”
When she arrived in the US in 1954 at the start of her contract with MGM, a newspaper campaign engineered by the studio and sponsored by Armour Star meat products offered readers the chance to win a six-room house or $25,000 cash by proposing a new name for this latest exotic star-in-the-making. Contestants were asked to send in suggested names along with labels from corned beef hash and devilled ham. This all came to nought, and she was still not-so-plain-old Taina Elg when she began appearing on screen.
She landed her first major US role in 1957 (the same year that the Golden Globes named her New Foreign Star of the Year) in the Gene Kelly musical Les Girls. Newspapers were still helpfully reminding their readers at every opportunity that her first name rhymed with “Dinah”. They were also prone to tell them, as the Times-Tribune did in 1958, that Elg was “the only Finn of note” at that time in Hollywood and “the first from her country to become a genuine star of cinema
In Les Girls, directed by George Cukor and with music by Cole Porter, Elg held her own alongside Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall as dancers in a cabaret troupe headed by Kelly. Based on Constance Tomkinson’s reminiscences of her time in the Folies Bergère, and showing each character in succession looking back on the troupe’s glory days before acrimony set in, the film’s use of contradictory perspectives made it the closest thing to a musical take on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Elg’s performance as the apparently lovelorn and suicidal member of the group won her a second Golden Globe.
She followed this with Imitation General (1958), in which she was a French farm worker involved with a master sergeant (played by Glenn Ford) who impersonates a dead general to keep up his platoon’s morale. The role was played entirely in French.
I’m the only Finnish actress working here,” Elg said the following year. “Yet of the six films I’ve made, I have portrayed a French girl four times.”
Watusi (1959), in which she was a missionary’s daughter rescued by explorers and caught up in their jungle adventures, took the unfashionable route of making her German.
In the same year, she starred in the second adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (and the first in colour) as the netball coach who ends up handcuffed to the hero, here played by Kenneth More, as he is pursued by assassins.
Elg was born in Helsinki, and raised in assorted other Finnish locations, including Turku, by her mother, Helena Doroumova, and father, Åke Elg, who were both pianists. During the Finnish-Soviet wars, the family were forced to leave, returning to Helsinki only after the end of the second world war.
Taina trained as a ballet dancer from an early age and was accepted by the Finnish National Ballet as a child, which led to a handful of small roles in domestic films. She also danced at Sadler’s Wells and at the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in Paris and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, before an injury led her to reconsider her career.
She was spotted in London by the producer Edwin H Knopf, brother of the publisher Alfred. After an impressive screen test directed by Mel Ferrer, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM in Hollywood. Small roles followed in two films starring Lana Turner – the biblical tale The Prodigal (1955), in which Elg played a slave, and the 16th-century romance Diane (1956) – as well as Gaby (also 1956), with Leslie Caron as a French ballet dancer
The career high-point of Les Girls was never equalled. For the remainder of her career, Elg worked mostly in television and theatre. Occasional exceptions included Hercules in New York (1970), which gave an early starring role to the young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 1962, she headed the national touring production of Irma La Douce. In 1973, she starred on Broadway in Look to the Lilies, as well as understudying Julie Christie as Yelena in a production of Uncle Vanya. “I didn’t get a chance to go on and play it, as Julie was in excellent health,” she said.
In 1982, she originated the role of the philandering hero’s mother in Nine, the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. Her son was played by Raul Julía, with whom she had also starred in the 1974 revival of Where’s Charley?, for which she earned a Tony nomination.
She briefly found her way back to cinema thanks to two directors with a taste for the power of nostalgia. Mike Figgis’s thriller Liebestraum (1991), which was also Kim Novak’s final film before retiring, gave Elg her first movie role in more than two decades, as the matriarch of a department store business. She was a teacher in the romantic comedy The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), starring and directed by Barbra Streisand. Her final screen role came in the Finnish caper Kummelin Jackpot (2006).
Elg is survived by her son, the jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim, from a five-year marriage to Carl Gustav Björkenheim, which ended in divorce in 1958. Her second marriage, to Rocco Caporale, an academic, ended with his death in 2008.
