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 here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
One of her country’s most celebrated performers, Finnish actress and dancer Taina Elg was born in 1931 in Impilahti, in Southeastern Finland (located near the Finnish/Russian border). Her home later became a target during the Finnish-Soviet wars between 1939 and 1944 and when it became part of the Soviet Union, the family was forced to leave.
At a very young age, she began her training in ballet and acting. When the family moved to Helsinki, Taina continued with her dance and acting training and eventually was invited to join the Finnish National Ballet. She appeared in a few homeland movies as early as age 10 and found a couple of obscure film roles as a teenager, one in which she danced.
Taina’s international reputation began to grow when she joined the famed Sadler’s Wells ballet dance company (The Royal Ballet) in London and then the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, in Paris. A serious injury forced her to rethink her dancing career. Fortunately, she was discovered in London by American film producer Edwin H. Knopf and, on the heels of the spectacular Hollywood success fellow Scandinavian Anita Ekberg was having, MGM decided to sign Taina for a seven-year Hollywood contract.
She made her American debut for MGM with the secondary role of Elissa in the Lana Turner biblical costumer The Prodigal (1955). The following year MGM utilized her acting talents in their films Diane (1956), again starring Ms. Turner, and Gaby (1956) withLeslie Caron. For the afore-mentioned work she was honored with a Golden Globe award for female “foreign newcomer”.
Taina was subsequently handed her best all-around opportunity by MGM to display her sublime dancing, sexy figure and comedic acting skills when asked to portray Angèle Ducros in Cole Porter‘s musical Les Girls (1957) opposite Gene Kelly and alongside fellow dazzlers Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall. Receiving her second consecutive Golden Globe (tying with Kendall) for “Best Actress” in a musical, Les Girls (1957) also won the Golden Globe for “Best Picture – Musical” and an Oscar for its costume design.
More films came her way with Imitation General (1958) starring Glenn Ford and Red Buttons; the remake of the classic The 39 Steps (1959) opposite Kenneth More; the African adventure Watusi (1959) with George Montgomery and David Farrar and the war story Mission of Danger (1960), which was actually culled from a few TV episodes. None, however, could match the quality of Les Girls (1957
Ms. Elg’s Hollywood film career went into a steep decline at this juncture and she began focusing on TV projects, foreign films and especially theatre roles. Appearing on stage in such 1960s productions as “Redhead,” “Silk Stockings,” “Irma La Douce,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music” and “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” she finally made her Broadway debut with the musical “Look to the Lilies” in 1970, which was based on the Oscar-winning film Lilies of the Field (1963).
She never found a strong footing again in films and has appeared in less than a handful since. Other than the 1961 Italian spectacle Bondage Gladiator Sexy (1961), she showed up in the musclebound Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s vehicle Hercules in New York (1969),Liebestraum (1991), and the Barbra Streisand feature The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Her love for the stage was obvious and she remained as colorful than ever gracing such musicals as Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” (1973) in which she sang the haunting “Send in the Clowns.” She also returned to Broadway in later years with the musicals “Where’s Charley?”, for which she earned a Tony nomination, “Nine” and “Cabaret”. She appeared in the national tour of the musical “Titanic” in 1998-1999. On the non-musical stage she had strong roles in “Uncle Vanya,” “I Hate Hamlet” “O Pioneers!” and, more recently, “Requiem for William” and Memory of a Summer” (both 2003).
In 2004, the actress received a special honor from her native Finland, when she was knight by the Order of the Lion of Finland. She is a naturalized American citizen.
The jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is Taina’s son from her first marriage (1953-1958) to Carl “Poku” Björkenheim. In 1985 she was married to Rocco Caporale, an Italian educator and professor of sociology. The couple lived in New York City until his death in 2008.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
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.