European Actors Archives - Page 15 of 28

Haya Harareet

Haya Harareet. IMDB.

Haya Harareet was born in 1931 in Haifa, Palestine and was one of Israel’s best known actresses in the 1950’s. She came to international fame in 1956 with the movie “Hill 24 Doesnt Answer”. Her best known role came in 1959 as the lading lady of William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur”.

She starred opposite Stewart Granger in “The Secret Partner” which was made in England. In 1962 she went to the U.S, to make “The Interns”. She stopped making movies in 1964. She was long married to the great English director Jack Clayton who died in 1995.

IMDB entry:

Born in Palestine before the inception of the Israeli state in the city of Haifa, she first distinguished herself by winning one of the first beauty contests in the nascent Israel. Haya Harareet (also spelled Hararit) made her debut in Thorold Dickinson‘s film Giv’a 24 Eina Ona (1955) (“Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer”).

The landmark Israeli film, mostly in English, is also the first feature-length production to be shot and processed entirely in Israel, and made for international distribution.

The film was an official selection at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival and Harareet won an award for her role in the film. She plays Miriam Mizrahi, a fourth generation, dark-eyed and beautiful Sabra, working for the underground.

Best-known for her role as Esther, opposite Charlton Heston in William Wyler‘s film classic Ben-Hur (1959), she also played in Francesco Maselli‘s The Doll That Took the Town (1958) (“The Doll that Took the Town”) with Virna Lisi, _Edgar G. Ulmer”s Journey Beneath the Desert (1961) (“Journey Beneath The Desert”, AKA “The Lost Kingdom”)withJean-Louis Trintignant, and Basil Dearden‘s The Secret Partner (1961) with Stewart Granger. She cowrote the screenplay for Our Mother’s House (1967) which starred Dirk Bogarde.

Ms. Harareet was also credited as a presenter for ‘Best Special Effects’ at the 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 1960.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

She was married to the British film director Jack Clayton until his death in 1995.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Dann

The Times obituary in 2021.

When William Wyler was searching for a female lead for his biblical epic Ben-Hur, his mind turned back to a beautiful young Israeli actress he had met two years earlier at the Cannes Film Festival.

He had already cast the title role but was struggling to find the right actress to play Charlton Heston’s love interest, Esther. More than 30 names were considered, including Ava Gardner and Carroll Baker. None of them seemed right, and then the director remembered the little-known Haya Harareet.

Wyler had come across her at Cannes in 1955 when Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, in which she starred, had been nominated for the Palme d’Or. Directed by Thorold Dickinson, the film did not win but had its own place in history as the first feature-length production to be shot and produced in Israel for international distribution. Harareet shone in the film as a young Jewish woman working for the underground during the war for Israeli independence. When Wyler met her at a reception at one of the swanky hotels on La Croisette overlooking the Mediterranean, he was impressed by her sultry looks and her sharp intelligence.

Two years later Wyler could not remember her name but ordered his production team to “find that Israeli girl I met in Cannes”. It took them weeks to track her down to Paris, where she was living, and when she arrived in Rome, where filming was due to start, he gave her the part on the strength of a 30- second screen test. She also signed a four-year contract with MGM, becoming the first Israeli actress to be taken on by a Hollywood studio.

She might easily have got lost in the epic grandeur of Ben-Hur. The movie cost $15 million to make and at the time was the most extravagant production in cinema history. The set for the film’s climactic chariot race alone covered 18 acres, was five storeys high and took six months to build. More than 300 actors had speaking parts and the film deployed 10,000 extras, not to mention more than 200 camels and 2,500 horses.

Yet Harareet was not overawed and Wyler coached a career-defining performance from her. Variety hailed the emergence of “a performer of stature” and continued: “Her portrayal of Esther, the former slave, is sensitive and revealing. She has a striking appearance and represents a welcome departure from the standard Hollywood ingénue”. The review also gave Wyler “considerable credit for taking a chance on an unknown”.

The film was banned in several Arab countries because of Harareet’s nationality but Ben-Hur was a box-office smash and became the biggest grossing film since Gone with the Wind. Adjusted for inflation, the film made $1.8 billion and to this day sits in the list of the top 20 money-spinning movies of all time. The film also garnered 11 Academy awards, a record until it was equalled by Titanic four decades later.

Harareet at the Cannes film festival in 1960

Harareet became an overnight sensation and was photographed with Heston on the red carpet at glittering premieres in New York and Los Angeles. When she arrived in Britain for the European premiere she noted with satisfaction that the bathroom of her suite at Claridge’s was larger than the entirety of the cramped lodgings she had occupied when living in London several years earlier.

Yet the epic scale of the movie came at a cost. The film’s producer had a heart attack on set and died, and the production supervisor was also forced to retire with stress-related heart problems. Harareet’s health survived the rigours of the nine-month shoot but her career did not. Despite a sheath of press cuttings hailing her as “Hollywood’s brightest new star”, she felt Ben-Hur had typecast her as an “exotic beauty”.

I’m an actress who played the part of Esther. But that doesn’t mean I have to go on playing her for the rest of my life,” she complained. The roles she was offered on the back of Ben-Hur were “boring” and MGM wouldn’t allow her to “grow up”.

To negotiate her escape, she drew the studio’s attention to her friendship with left-wing socialists. “You don’t want to be associated with a communist, do you?” she told the studio provocatively. In truth she had never been a party member but the stink of McCarthyism still lingered in Hollywood. The ruse worked and she was released from her contract.

She was also keen to leave for another reason. At the 1960 Academy awards she met the British director Jack Clayton, whose film Room at the Top was up against Ben-Hur for several awards. It was love at first sight. The following morning he delivered 1,000 roses to her hotel room and as soon as her MGM contract was cancelled she moved to Britain to live with him.

They subsequently married and lived together in leafy Buckinghamshire until Clayton’s death in 1995. They were inseparable for 35 years.

She was cast opposite Stewart Granger in the British-made thriller The Secret Partner in 1961 and appeared in one more Hollywood movie, playing a single mother training to be a doctor in David Swift’s 1962 feature The Interns. After abandoning acting she wrote the screenplay for her husband’s 1967 film Our Mother’s House starring Dirk Bogarde and at the age of 40 took a degree in political science at the London School of Economics. A previous marriage to Nachman Zerwanitzer, an irrigation engineer, ended in divorce before she left Israel.

Haya Neuberg was born in 1931 in Haifa, in what was then the British mandate of Palestine. Her parents, Reuben and Yocheved Neuberg, were Jewish immigrants from Poland. At school she was given the name Hararit (later changed to Harareet), which means “mountainous” in Hebrew.

At 17 she left home without parental approval to join the Israeli Defence Forces’ equivalent of Ensa, entertaining those fighting in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. She also won one of the first beauty contests held in the newly formed state, which helped to launch her career as an actress at the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv.

She left Israel in 1956 for Italy, where she befriended the directors Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, who taught her Italian during long weekends on the island of Capri. From there she moved to London and then Paris, where she learnt French well enough to appear on the stage before Wyler tracked her down.

She made annual trips to Israel to see her family before finally returning one last time, having asked for her ashes to be scattered in the land of her birth.

Haya Harareet, actress, was born on September 20, 1931. She died in her sleep on February 3, 2021, aged 89

Jacqueline Sassard

Jacqueline Sassard was one of the most beautiful of actresses on film in the 1960’s. She was born in France in 1940. She made her film debut in 1956 and among her credits are “The Magistrate” in 1960, “Seasons of Our Love”, Joseph Losey’s “Accident” opposite Stanley Baker, Dirk Bogarde and Michael York and “Les Biches” in 1968. She received stunning reviews for these last three films so it is surprising that she ceased making films in 1968 at the age of only 28.

Jacqueline Sassard In 1940 in Nice, France) is an actress best known for appearances in Italian films such as Guendalinadirected by Alberto Lattuada, a young woman with family and economical troubles in Luigi Zampa‘s Il Magistrato and Valerio Zurlini‘s Violent Summer (1959), in which her character was left by Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Her best remembered role was in Joseph Losey‘s Accident, with a script by Harold Pinter (1967), where she played an Austrian princess.

Her final screen appearance was in Le voleur de crimes (Crime Thief), directed by Nadine Trintignant in 1969.

She left the film industry on her marriage to Gianni Lancia.

They lived for a number years in Brazil before returning to live in Alpes-Maritimes in the south of France. They had a son, Lorenzo Lancia. Gianni Lancia died in 2014.

Sarita Montiel was born in 1928 in Spain. In 1954 she starred in the U.S movie “Vera Cruz” opposite Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. Her other films include “Serenade” with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine and “Run of the Arrow”. She was married to the late great film director Anthony Mann. She died in 2013.

“Independent” obituary by :Alasdair Fotheringham

Sara Montiel is widely considered one of Spain’s greatest female film stars of the 20th century: but it is perhaps more for what she managed, with huge skill, to come to symbolise than for her artistic output that she will be remembered long-term

It is true that she was the first Spanish actress to conquer Hollywood in the 1950s, acting alongside Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper – and her beauty helped her gain a trail of lovers and husbands that ranged from Hemingway (who taught her to smoke cigars) to the film director Anthony Mann.

But for the vast majority of Spaniards during Franco’s era, Montiel simply represented everything that seemed completely unimaginable: international glamour, ridiculous affluence, and a voluptuous feminine sexuality that did not give two hoots for the country’s repressive social mores. As La Vanguardia newspaper put it in its obituary, “In an era of black shawls and hard bread, she kept us in touch with the times.”

Montiel’s fame in Spain reached the point where for over two decades her plunging necklines, richly erotic deep voice and sensual singing of cuplés – a type of popular, often romantic song – in a series of otherwise forgettable movies acted as a kind of pressure valve for censor-bound Spanish society.

El Último Cuplé (“The Last Cuplé”, 1957), a low-budget film which combined cuplés with the classic contemporary Spanish movie format (femme fatale plus willing-to-be-seduced bullfighter plus bullfighter’s morally pure bride-to-be, equals sweeping melodrama) was the biggest of her box-office smashes. Its title song, “Fumando Espero” (“I wait whilst smoking”), recorded in a voice that the producer insisted Montiel made so husky and low she protested she would end up sitting underneath the piano, remained a major hit for years afterwards.

But as much as what she did or how she looked, what fascinated Spaniards was who she knew – which in 1950s Hollywood was just about everybody. In the last photo of a living James Dean, he is next to Montiel, both of them laughing. Friends included Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Holiday and Brando.

Her list of lovers, affairs and broken hearts stretched from Dean (whose fatal car crash happened after “an afternoon of love” with her, or so she claimed), to playwright Miguel Mihura, Indalecio Prieto, one of the top ministers in the former Spanish Republic, and even the 1959 Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Severo Ochoa. (Montiel described him as “the great love of my life… but him researching all day and me making films all day just didn’t match.”)

For ordinary Spaniards, another appealing side of Montiel was her working-class background. Montiel was born and brought up in Campo de Criptana, a tiny town on the empty plains of central Castille, before moving to the Valencian coast as a teenager. Her father’s income was so meagre as a field worker, she later claimed that she would dig up roots to eat. (If this recalls Scarlet O’Hara grubbing for potatoes in Gone with the Wind, then it would not be the first or last time that fact and fiction blurred in her life.)

Discovered when singing a religious song by film producer Vicente Casanova in 1944, aged 15, her first film was Te Quiero Para Mí (“I Want You for Me”). Six years and 14 films later, including successes like Locura de Amor (“The Madness of Love”, 1948), she started working in Mexico, performing mostly singing roles. Piel Canela (1953), in which she played a gangster’s moll in a Havana nightclub, saw her shoot up the ladder to Hollywood’s top circle of film stars, despite not speaking a word of English – the first Spanish actress ever to do so.

Together with Gary Cooper (with whom she had a much-publicised romance) she took part in the Western Vera Cruz (1954) and then, while playing a secondary role in Joan Fontaine’s Serenade, she met and fell in love with Anthony Mann. Their wedding, as it was a civil one, was downplayed in Franco’s Spain, as was the divorce in 1961 – in stark contrast to when she married Spanish businessman Jose Vicente Ramirez in 1964 in a massive Catholic church ceremony. (The fact that it only lasted a couple of months before they separated was discreetly ignored).

By then, her cachet as a sex symbol had mushroomed thanks to El Último Cuplé, which kicked off a series of films – La Bella Lola (“Beautiful Lola”, 1962), Noches De Casablanca (“Casablanca Nights”, 1963), La Dama de Beirut (“The Lady of Beirut”, 1965) – which, if unremarkable in their content, gave Montiel a vast following of fans in Spain.

The end of the dictatorship in 1975, though, meant that her appeal suddenly shrank; but Montiel made the perfect sideways move. She began a seemingly interminable series of TV chat show appearances, while well-timed interviews with “intimate revelations” in gossip magazines kept her star from fading.

As if that were not enough, she wrote biographies with suggestive titles like Sara and Sex (2003); sung rap music in her seventies; and, in 2002, married a Cuban film producer 36 years her junior – all of which helped to ensure that she maintained a certain presence.

“I am not your ‘typical woman’,” she said last year. “Not at all. I am 84 and I don’t have a lot of time left. But in the last 54 years there’s been nobody like me.”

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

RUN OF THE ARROW, aka YUMA, US poster art, Sara Montiel aka Sarita Montiel, Rod Steiger, 1957. Courtesy Everett Collection ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MCDRUOF EC058

Sven Bertil-Taube was born in Stockholm in 1934. He is a reknowned folk singer who has also acted in movies. Among his films are “Puppet on a Chain” with Barbara Parkins in 1971 and “The Eagle Has Landed”. Most recently he has starred in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”.

Sandor Eles

Born in1936 sometimes credited simply as Sandor Eles, was a Hungarian actor. He was best known latterly for TV and film work.

Born in Tatabánya, 60 km from Budapest, Elès was orphaned during World War II, and emigrated to England during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He began his acting career on stage, and went on to appear in a host of television roles, the majority on ITV. These included the ITC series Danger Man, The Baron, The Saint, Timeslip and Jason King.

He made appearances in The Avengers, The Professionals, Strange Report and Upstairs, Downstairs. Often cast in generic ‘foreigner’ roles (diplomats, waiters, desk clerks), he most often played Frenchmen. Éles became a British citizen on 10 January 1977.

One of his most memorable film roles was as the mysterious Paul in the Brian Clemensthriller And Soon the Darkness. He also had major roles in the Hammer Horror movies Countess Dracula (1971) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) as well as appearing for four years in the 1980s as the scheming restaurant manager, Paul Ross, in the British TV soap opera Crossroads.

In 1996, Elès returned to his cultural roots, appearing as the narrator in the Bartók opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. The concert performances, given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Bernard Haitink, were recorded for CD

Elès died in Kilburn, London on 10 September 2002, aged 66, apparently from a heart attack.

The great boxer Max Schmeling was born in 1905 in Brandenburg, Germany. He was World Heavyweight Champion from 1930 to 1932. He was married to actress Anna Ondra. He was featured in the films “Liebe in Ring” in 1930 and “Knockout” in 1935. After retiring from the ring, he became a very wealthy businessman and died in his 100th year in 2005.

His “Guardian” obituary by Mike Lewis:

Max Schmeling, Germany’s former world heavyweight champion, who has died aged 99, will primarily be remembered as the boxer who lost the most politically charged sporting bout in history. That was his crushing, one-round defeat by the American Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber”, at New York’s Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938.

From the opening bell, Louis, the champion, tore into Schmeling and sent him staggering around the ring under a merciless assault. Schmeling, dropped three times, was bewildered, semi-conscious and slumped on all fours when rescued by the referee, after one of the most savage onslaughts ever seen in a prize ring. The victory of Louis, after two minutes and four seconds, was his most awesome performance.

It was the approach of the second world war that transformed the nature of the fight and made Schmeling an unwilling propaganda tool of the Nazis. The confrontation was sold as a fight between a member of Hitler’s “master race” and an American black, and assumed huge symbolic importance.

There were calls to “boycott Nazi Schmeling” and he protested in vain that this was “just another fight”. While, despite Louis’s assertion that he was fighting for “the good old USA”, white reporters from southern states – where Jim Crow white supremacist racialseg regation ruled – openly hankered for a German victory. Even as Schmeling, nicknamed “Hitler’s show-horse”, had tea with the Führer on his way to the title challenge bout, German troops massed on the borders of Czechoslovakia.

The drama began on June 19, 1936, when Schmeling caused the “sensation of the century” by knocking out Louis in the 12th round of a non-title bout. That defeat for Louis – his first in 28 fights – caused riots in Harlem. A man who had backed Schmeling was stabbed and had his skull fractured.

Schmeling’s success happened two months before the Nazi attempt to use the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for white, Aryan supremacy (ruined by the triumph of black American athlete Jesse Owens).

Schmeling’s future would have been different had he lost that first encounter with Louis. During the build-up, friendly US sportswriters described the German as gentlemanly, sportsmanlike and courageous. Their attitude changed dramatically when Schmeling, a huge underdog, flattened the unbeaten Louis with a straight right.

The fight was almost ignored by the Nazi press, after Hitler privately questioned the wisdom of taking on the invincible American; but Schmeling’s shock victory led to wild celebrations in Germany. He received congratulatory cables from the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; and also from Marlene Dietrich, by then in American exile.

A film of the fight played to packed houses in Germany. A Nazi weekly journal, Das Schwarz Korps, commented: “Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race.”

The irony was that Schmeling, who had been world heavyweight champion from 1930-32, did not support Hitler’s racial and religious persecutions. In 1935, he had blatantly defied the Führer’s order to replace Joe Jacobs, his Jewish-American trainer. He also refused to divorce his Czechoslovakian film star wife, Anny Ondra. On November 9, 1938, five months after his defeat by Louis, he sheltered two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristalnacht, when the Nazis instigated public violence against Germany’s Jews.

Born in Uckermark, in the state of Brandenburg, Schmeling was raised in Hamburg and had ambitions to be a football goalkeeper until, at the age of 14, he saw a newsreel of the US boxer Jack Dempsey. Schmeling, self-taught, developed sound skills, an iron physique and a powerful punch with either hand. He turned professional in August 1924, winning the Germany light-heavyweight title three years later and the European crown in 1928.

In pre-Nazi Berlin, one of the most glamorous, exciting cities in Europe, Schmeling was as feted by high society as was Dietrich at the height of her Blue Angel movie success. “It was a time that wanted heroes,” he remembered.

Following two successful European title defences, Schmeling moved up to heavyweight to challenge American Jack Sharkey for the world title, left vacant by the retirement of Gene Tunney. The fight was in New York on June 12, 1930; Schmeling won on a foul in round four, after a short left hook to the groin left him in agony. It was the first time the world title had been decided in such circumstances.

Schmeling beat Young Stribling on a 15th-round stoppage at Cleveland in 1931, only to lose his title on a split decision to Sharkey at Long Island on June 21, 1932, a controversial verdict that prompted an enraged Jacobs to cry: “We wuz robbed.”

Schmeling paid a high price for his defeat by Louis. He was the only top German sportsman to be drafted into the Wehrmacht. At the outbreak of war, he was called into a parachute regiment, and, in 1941, was wounded in the battle for Crete.

Having lost his property and wealth in the war, Schmeling made a comeback on his 42nd birthday, knocking out Werner Vollmer in round seven. He went on to beat Hans Joachim Dragstein, but was outpointed by Walter Neusel, whom he had stopped in 1934. His last fight was in October 1948; he was outpointed by Richard Vogt. In all, Schmeling had 70 fights, winning 53, including 39 stoppages, drawing four and losing 10. He ploughed his earnings into a farm, acquired business skills and secured a production licence from Coca-Cola.

The longest-lived world heavyweight champion, Schmeling became a successful businessman and a popular, well-respected member of Hamburg society. He avoided interviews, believing that the media had an unhealthy obsession with his distant past. He was probably the last living person to have spoken with Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Al Capone, Pope Pius XII – and Marlene Dietrich.

Three decades ago, he said he was almost happy that he had lost the great fight. “Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.” He stayed friends with Louis in later years, and even gave him financial help.

He met Anny Ondra on set while he was appearing in a film. They married in 1932, she died in 1987.

· Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling, boxer, born September 28 1905, died February 2 2005

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Amira Casar holds both Irish and French citizenship. She was born in London, grew up in Ireland at at sixteen moved to France with her parents. She worked as a model before studying acting. Her films include “Why Not Me” in 1999, “Transylvania” and “An Old Mistress”.

IMDB entry:

She worked as a model for Chanel and the fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Born in England and subsequently raised in England, Ireland and France, Amira Casar, studied drama at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique de Paris.

Member of the jury at the Angers First Film Festival in 2006.

Daughter of Kurdish father and a Russian opera singer.

Activities : fencing, horse-riding includes side saddle and jumping, swimming, water skiing, snow skiing, motorbike riding, martial arts, athletics.

She collaborated with the artist Sophie Calle for her Venice Biennale Installation “Prenez soin de vous”.

She played the lead role in Eleonore Faucher’s film “Gamines” in 2009. For her portrayal as Dora Maar, the surrealist artist and Picasso’s muse in “La Femme qui Pleure au Chapeau Rouge”, she won the best actress award at La Rochelle Television Film Festival.

She is fluent in both English and French, has worked in German, Italian and Spanish.

he above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

Frank Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1928. He starred in Elia Kazan’s “America, America” in 1963 and “Once Upon A Time in the West” in 1968. He died in 1971 in Rome.

Philippe Perrottet

Collection of Classic European Actors

Haya Harareet

Haya Harareet. IMDB.

The Times obituary in 2021.

Jacqueline Sassard

Jacqueline Sassard

Sarita Montiel

Sven-Bertil Taube

Sandor Eles

Sandor Eles

Max Schmeling

Amira Casar

Frank Wolf

Philippe Perrottet

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