Simone Silva was born in Cairo, Egypt to French parents in 1928. She came to Britain in the late 1940’s and virually all of her acting career was in British films. Her first film was in 1951 in “Lady Godiva Rides Again”. Her other films include “South of Algiers”, “The Weak and the Wicked” and “Third Party Risk”. She died in 1957 at the age of 29 in London.
IMDB entry:
Simone Silva was born to French-Italian parents in Cairo as Simone de Bouillard. She was known mainly in England, where the great majority of her films were produced, as an actress of B-movies, who usually played supporting roles and bit parts.This mostly forgotten actress in some ways was more bright in life than in her very short career. Her tragic death was not entirely the result of natural causes. She was found dead in London’s fashionable Mayfair district after having apparently suffered a stroke likely brought on by a severe diet, as she struggled desperately to return to the screen in perfect shape.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Yuri Suassuna de Medeiros: yuri.medeiros@gmail.com
Hildegard Knef was born in 1925 in Ulm in Germany. She began studying actiong in 1940 and made some films before the fall of the Third Reich. Her first international film was in 1951 in “Decision Before Dawn” with Oscar Werner. She won a contract with 20th Century Fox and in Hollywood she made “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward” and “Diplomatic Courier” with Tyrone Power. She starred on Broaway in “Silk Stockings” in 1955 and also had a successful career as a singer. Knef was also an acclaimed writer. She died in 2002 at the age of 76.
IMDB entry:
Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was born on December 28, 1925 in Ulm, Germany. In 1940, she began studying acting. Even before the fall of the Third Reich, she appeared in several films, but most of them were only released after the war. To avoid being raped by Soviet soldiers, she dressed like a young man and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. She escaped and returned to war-shattered Berlin where she played her first parts on stage. The first German movie after World War II, Murderers Among Us (1946), made her a star. David O. Selznick invited her to Hollywood and offered her a contract – with two conditions: Hildegard Knef should change her name into Gilda Christian and should pretend to be Austrian instead of German. She refused both and returned to Germany. In 1951, she provoked one of the greatest scandals in German film history when she appeared naked on the screen in the movie Sunderin (1951). The Roman Catholic Church protested vehemently against that film, but Hildegard just commented: “I can’t understand all that tumult – five years after Auschwitz!”
With the support of her first husband, the American Kurt Hirsch, she tried a second time to launch a Hollywood career, changed her family name from Knef to Neff (because Americans could not pronounce Knef), but the only worthwhile part she got was a supporting role in the Hemingway adaptation of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952). She became a leading lady in German, French and British films. Finally, America offered her another chance, this time on the stage. She achieved a kind of stardom as Ninotchka in the very popular Broadway play, “Silk Stockings”. In 1963, she began a new career as a singer and surprised the audience with her typical, deep, smoky voice and the fact that many lyrics of her songs were written by herself. In 1970, she wrote the autobiographical bestseller “Der Geschenkte Gaul”. She got sympathy from all over the world for her fight against cancer, which she defeated several times.
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Elke Sommer was born in 1940 in Berlin. She came to film prominence in the early 1960’s and starred opposite the leading men of the time including Paul Newman in “The Prize” in 1963 , Peter Sellers in “A Shot in the Dark” in 1964, “The Art of Love” with Dick Van Dyke and James Garner and “The Oscar” opposite Stephen Boyd. In the 1970’s she starred in some classic Italian horror films and in the UK starred in a “Carry On”, “Carry On Behind”. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
This gorgeous Teutonic temptress was one of Hollywood’s most captivating imports of the 1960s. Blonde and beautiful, Berlin-born Elke Sommer, with her trademark pouty lips, high cheekbones and sky-high bouffant hairdos, proved irresistible to American audiences, whether adorned in lace or leather, or donning lingerie or lederhosen. She was born in Berlin-Spandau on November 5, 1940 with the unlikely name of Else Schletz-Ho to a Lutheran minister and his wife. The family was forced to evacuate to Erlangen, during World War II in 1942, a small university town in the southern region of Germany. It was here that her parents first introduced her to water colors and her lifelong passion for painting was ignited. Her father’s death in 1955, when she was only 14, interrupted her education and she relocated to Great Britain, where she learned English and made ends meet as an au pair. She eventually attended college back in Germany and entertained plans to become a diplomatic translator but, instead, decided to try modeling.
After winning a beauty title (“Miss Viareggio Turistica”) while on vacation in Italy, she caught the attention of renowned film actor/director Vittorio De Sica and began performing on screen. Her debut film was in the Italian feature, Men and Noblemen(1959), which starred DeSica and was directed by Giorgio Bianchi. Following a few more Italian pictures, which included her first starring role in Love, the Italian Way (1960), also directed by Bianchi, Elke began making a name for herself in German films, as well, and gradually upgraded her status to European sex symbol. A pin-up favorite, she appeared fetchingly in both dramas and comedies, with such continental features asDaniella by Night (1961), Sweet Ecstasy (1962) and her first English-speaking picture,Why Bother to Knock (1961), to her credit.
Hollywood naturally became intrigued and she moved there in the early 1960s to try and tap into the foreign-born market. Her sexy innocence made a vivid impression in the all-star, war-themed drama, The Victors (1963), the Hitchcock-like thriller, The Prize (1963), for which she won a “Best Newcomer” Golden Globe Award, and, especially, A Shot in the Dark (1964), the classic bumbling comedy where she proved a shady and sexy foil toPeter Sellers‘ Inspector Clousseau. She grew in celebrity, which was certainly helped after showing off her physical assets, posing for spreads in Playboy Magazine. In the meantime, she was appearing opposite the hunkiest of Hollywood actors including Paul Newman, James Garner, Glenn Ford and Stephen Boyd.
The multilingual actress, whose career took her to scores of different countries over time and benefited from speaking seven languages fluently, resorted to a number of low-budget features in Europe, including two Italian horror movies directed by Mario Bavathat have now gone on to become cult classics: Baron Blood (1972) and The Exorcist(1973) rip-off, Lisa and the Devil (1972). The latter movie actually was a guilty pleasure. “Lisa” was re-released in 1975 as “The House of Exorcism” and added more footage of a demonic Elke, Linda Blair style, spewing frogs, insects, green pea soup and a slew of cuss words! In England, she good-naturedly appeared in the “comedy” films, Percy(1971), and its equally cheeky sequel, It’s Not the Size That Counts (1974), which starred Hywel Bennett (later Leigh Lawson) as the first man to have a penis transplant(!). She also showed up in one of the later “Carry On” farces, entitled Carry on Behind (1975).
Elke fared better on television, where she appeared in the television pilot, Probe (1972), opposite Hugh O’Brian, as well as the well-made 1980s miniseries, Inside the Third Reich(1982), Jenny’s War (1985), Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986) and Peter the Great(1986). A delightful personality on the talk show circuit, the lovely Elke also made appearances as a cabaret singer and, in time, put out several albums. She found a creative outlet on stage too with such vehicles as “Irma la Douce”, “Born Yesterday”, “Cactus Flower”, “Woman of the Year” and “Same Time, Next Year”.
The veteran actress has since focused more time on book writing and painting than she has on acting. Holding her first one-woman art show at the McKenzie Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1965, her artwork bears an exceptionally strong influence to Marc Chagall and she, at one point, hosted a mid-1980s PBS series (“Painting with Elke”), that centered on her artwork, which has now exhibited and sold for more than 40 years. Nevertheless, on occasion, she tackles an acting role, often in her native Germany. Divorced from writer and journalist Joe Hyams, whom she met when he interviewed her for a Hollywood article (he recently died in November 2008), she has been married since 1993 to hotelier Wolf Walther.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Walter Slezak was born in Vienna in 1902. His father was a famous opera singer Leo Slezak. He acted as a leading man in German silent films. He made his Broadway debut in 1941. The following year he made his first Hollywood film “Once Upon A Honeymoon” with Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant. Amonh his other films are “Sinbard the Sailor”, “The Princess and the Pirate” and “Come September”. He died in 1983.
TCM Overview:
Romantic lead and then (due to his increasing weight) character player, discovered by Michael Curtiz in Hungary in 1922. Slezak began appearing in German films that year and moved to the US, initially as a stage actor, in 1930. His screen roles were often as heavies, notably in “This Land is Mine” (1943) and “Lifeboat” (1944). Like his father, Leo Slezak (1873-1946), he was also a gifted opera singer. Daughter Erika Slezak has appeared on daytime soaps.
Anna Maria Sandri was born in 1936 in Rome. Her first film was as a child in “La Morte Civile” in 1942. She only made a few films, the best known being “The Black Tent” in 1956 with Donald Sinden and Anthony Steel. It seems to have also been her final film to date.
Harriet Andersson was born in 1932 in Stockholm. She is associated with the films of the great Ingmar Bergman. Her films with him include “Smiles of a Summer Night” in 1955, “Through a Glass Darkly”, “Cries and Whispers” and in 1972, “Fanny and Alexander”. Her other films include “A Deadly Afffair” directed by Sidney Lumet in 1966 and Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” in 2003.
TCM Overview:
A sensual, stunningly beautiful member of Ingmar Bergman’s troupe, Harriet Andersson was featured in many of the director’s early classics. Unlike other typical Swedish leading ladies, Andersson was dark-haired, but her outsider appearance was used to smoldering, even kittenish appeal. She began by performing dance halls while still a teenager and at age 18 made her screen debut in “Medan Staden Sover/While the City Sleeps” (1950). Bergman cast her two years later using her coarse but sensual appeal to good effect in “Summer with Monika” (It is a still photograph from this film that Jean-Pierre Leaud steals in Francois Truffaut’s 1959 masterpiece “The 400 Blows”.) For the director, she was often the lower-class girl, as in her circus performer in “Sawdust and Tinsel” (1953) or her maid Petra in the comic “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955). Bergman elevated her somewhat as the schizophrenic in “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961) and the dying sister in “Cries and Whispers” (1972) but in their final screen collaboration “Fanny and Alexander” (1981) had her back as a kitchen maid.
Despite the international attention Andersson received for her work with Bergman, it was her husband Jorn Donner who offered her more substantial roles. She received a Best Actress citation from the 1964 Venice Film Festival as a married woman rediscovering the pleasures of sex and romance in Donner’s “To Love”. More recently, Andersson projected underlying rebellion as a sympathetic teacher in “Beyond the Sky” (1993).
Unlike her colleagues such as Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann who were also launched by Bergman, Andersson has made few international films. She made her English-language debut in Sidney Lumet’s “The Deadly Affair” (1966), but seemed more at ease working with her countrymen. Andersson has made a handful of Swedish TV-movies, including “I HHHavsbandet” (1971), and occasional stage appearances, including playing Anne Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 1953 and Ophelia in “Hamlet”.
Lila Kedrova was born in Russia in 1918. She joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1932. She made many French films in the 1950’s and in 1964 she replaced Simone Signoret in “Zorba the Greek” with Anthony Quinn. She won an Academy Award for her performance. She went on to make “Torn Curtain” with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She won critial acclaim in 1980 for her performance with Melvyn Douglas in “Tell Me A Riddle”. She died in Ontario, Canada in 2000 at the age of 81.
Her “Guardian” obituary:
Lila Kedrova was rumoured to be 80 when she died – she had chosen her own birth date when all paper evidence was abandoned as her family fled Russia after the Revolution: she liked to say that this allowed her to be any age she wanted. And her preferred age was 16, the age of the soubrette.
That was her gift: she played tragic soubrettes, foolish but not silly young women aged 38 and 66 and 71, still willing to believe that romance will blossom even as they recount, broken-voiced, how romance has failed them in the past.
Kedrova was 45 when director Michael Cacoyannis phoned from Crete to invite her to take over the role of Mme Hortense in Zorba the Greek, after Simone Signoret walked out on him a week into shooting. His Hollywood producers advised him to buy the biggest replacement name around, but he knew that Kedrova – whom he called Little Monster for her persistence – had yearned for the role, even though she was 20 years too young to be the consumptive whore.
He asked in French if she could speak English. “Oui,” she lied, flew forthwith from Paris to Crete, caught flu, hid in bed and learned her lines for the first scene. The whole crew, protective of her, coached her: in snagged crochet gloves, she gave the truest performance in that phoney film: her Hortense abandoned herself as totally as an adolescent to hope. Sentiment made her brave. She won an Oscar.
In 1984, by which time she was the right age and rather more – “smeary-faced, shimmery, out of a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas” wrote Frank Rich – she won a Tony for Hortense again, once more opposite Anthony Quinn, in the Broadway musical version.
Lila, short for Elizabeth, was born in whatever was the Russian equivalent of a theatre trunk. Her father was a singer, director of the Kedroff Quartet, her mother in the Petrograd Opera. Lila Kedrova studied piano (encouraged by Shostakovich, for whom she claimed she turned pages of score), her education broken by the family flight first to Germany, then Paris – at the beginning of the Stalin terror, a stranger on the street told her father he was on the list to be purged.
The Kedroffs were Bohemian refugees; Lila went barefoot; Lila was acquainted with Stravinsky and Prokofiev; Lila ran off with the gypsies and pretended to be an orphan to join the circus, pulling a “big, old, friendly” bear around the ring on a chain.
At 14, she joined the emigré Moscow Arts Theatre, a Stanislavsky-style touring company; learnt discipline singing in cafe-concert, (“Quick-quick, I change dress, make up, all”); and studied at drama school under actor-director Pierre Valide, whom she married.
Her “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Penelope, poster, US poster art, from left: Lila Kedrova, Lou Jacobi, Peter Falk, Dick Shawn (standing on head), Natalie Wood (front), Ian Bannen Jonathan Winters, 1966. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
In the 50s, he directed her initial stage successes, including The Rose Tattoo. She was in A View from The Bridge, A Taste of Honey, and a drug addict in Razzia sur la Chnouf, for which she won the French critics’ best performance award in 1955, when it was made into a film.
She reluctantly took roles in European and Hollywood films – including Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and A High Wind in Jamaica – but hated to leave the stage even for a holiday. After Zorba, she could have patented the character on the movie cameo role circuit of the time, but she did not: her best performance was in Polanski’s 1976 The Tenant.
Onstage, she took the part she had always been meant to play, Lyuba Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in London in 1967: her Ranevskaya’s sense of loss at parting with the estate was overcome by excitement at rejoining her lover and frittering away the money in Paris. (During the production she had met her second husband, Canadian stage director Richard Howard.)
The next year, she was Frau Schroeder, Sally Bowles’s Berlin landlady in the London production of Cabaret, a widow romanced by a Jewish greengrocer: this time love did not make her brave. “What would you do?”, she half-growled, half whispered, and – parting pragmatically with hope – “It’ll all go on, if we’re here or not. So who cares. So what?” But when she played Gigi’s aunt at the Fortune in 1976, she seemed, for all the wisdom, younger than teenage Gigi; she was perfectly wistful as Madame Armfeld in A Little Night Music at Chichester in 1989.
Kedrova remained with Howard, based in Canada and Paris, until her death. She leaves no other family.
• Lila (Elizabeth) Kedrova, actress, born October 9 1919; died February 16 2000
Anna Sten was hailed as a successor to Greta Garbo. It did not happen but she was a good actress and her Hollywood films are worth checking out. She was born in the Ukraine in 1908. She made some German silent films and made a smoth transition to sound with 1931’s “Trapeze” and “The Brothers Karamazov” which were seen by the U.S. producer Samuel Goldwyn. He brought Ms Sten to Hollywood where she made 1934 “We Live Again” with Fredric March and “The Wedding Night” opposite Gary Cooper.When the movies did not prove successful at the box office, Goldwyn cancelled her contract. She continued to make films throught the 1940’s but often in supporting roles. Her husband was a very successful American producer Eugene Frenke. Anna Sten died in New York in 1993 at the age of 84.
Her “Independent” obituary:
GARBO] DIETRICH] STEN] It doesn’t have the same ring to it, but if their pre-Hollywood work is considered, Anna Sten leaves the others at the starting gate (Garbo with admittedly only two films). In Hollywood it was a different matter. Imported on the strength of the success of the other two, Sten was reasonably expected to outshine both: but she became the outstanding, the most publicised of all those who didn’t make it. ‘Goldwyn’s folly’ she was called, after he had spent over dollars 5m on failing to make her a star.
She became famous in her native Soviet Union in the lead of Boris Barnet’s near-perfect comedy The Girl with the Hatbox (1927), as a naive country girl being either misunderstood or wooed by some of Moscow’s most colourful young men. One of these was the great screen villain Vladimir Fogel, and she ran foul of him again in the grim The Yellow Ticket (1928), directed by Fedor Ozep, whom she married. Again she was the girl from the steppes, Fogel the wealthy bourgeois Muscovite whose children she was looking after, and her refusal to play footsy finds her eventually working the streets.
Of her half-dozen Russian films, this became the most renowned throughout Europe, and Ozep took her to Germany to play Grushenka in his version of Dostoevsky, Der Morder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931). It may still be the best screen transcription of that writer, with Fritz Kortner on magnificent form as Dimitri, and Sten as the trollop who causes his downfall. This was one of the screen’s cliche roles, but Sten, part Marilyn Monroe, part Nancy Carroll, seemed never to have seen any previous screen vamp – let alone studied them.
Word from Europe was that Sten could out-Garbo Garbo, so Goldwyn was mindful to have her under contract. It was not perhaps a mistake on his part to publicise Sten as the new Garbo, since such was the fate of most of the other (female) European imports – though few of these remained residents of LA for long. It was an error to announce that her grooming would be in the hands of Dietrich’s mentor Josef von Sternberg, when neither he nor the equally autocratic Goldwyn ever took kindly to any ideas but his own. It was also foolish to spend two whole years with a constant barrage of publicity emerging about ‘tests’, plus the amounts being spent to turn Sten into a Hollywood ‘personality’, and on the search to find the vehicle to launch her.
It went without saying that puritan America was titillated by this formula: Old Europe plus beauty equals sin and temptation, and it was Zola’s whore, Nana, who became Sten’s first transatlantic incarnation – though not without a record number of tribulations. The first version, directed by George Fitzmaurice, was scrapped, and it was entirely remade by Dorothy Arzner. Goldwyn booked Radio City Music Hall for two almost unprecedented weeks (King Kong was another matter) – this was 1934 – and the suspense engendered among moviegoers, which meant just about everybody, was ended: it wasn’t that Sten wasn’t any good, but that she wasn’t very good. Acting in English, she was just another arch and accented seductress; and Zola’s great original had become merely another pot-bouille of the sins available to those who frequented the boulevards.
Goldwyn quickly rallied, returning Sten to Russia for a version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, now entitled We Live Again (1934), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. Fredric March played the Prince who lives an idyll with his peasant sweetheart and has his way with her, later, after learning the ways of the Imperial court. He repents after she has lost the baby and slipped far, far along the primrose path. This adaptation made Tolstoy irredeemably coy and was avoided by cinemagoers who had already had two chances to see Hollywood versions of this tale during the previous seven years.
Goldwyn tried again, and again with a notable director, King Vidor, The Wedding Night (1935). Sten became a Polish Connecticut peasant girl who attracts the discontented city writer Gary Cooper
Three Russian Girls, poster, from top, left, Anna Sten, Mimi Forsythe, Kathy Frye; right inset, Kent Smith, Anna Sten, 1943. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
When The Wedding Night became one of the few Cooper films to lose money Goldwyn was forced, finally, to see the writing on the wall. In letting Sten go he was relieved, at least, of the constant battles with her and her second husband, Eugene Frenke, over the publicity. Frenke took her to Britain for A Woman Alone (1936), which Ozep directed. Little was heard of it and less of Sten, till Hollywood’s enthusiasm for Russia’s war effort brought a few offers in films extolling the same. A handful of other movies followed, and in the Fifties she attempted to revive her career by studying at the Actors’ Studio. This led to the tour of Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, as Jenny, following its first presentation in New York, when Louis Armstrong’s record of ‘Mac the Knife’ did no harm at all. Sten found greater success with a new career – as a painter, exhibiting several times in New York.
She was one of cinema’s great enigmas. Most of the movies and people whom Goldwyn believed in are among the most disposable artefacts of Hollywood’s past. The exceptions – Cooper, Ronald Colman, William Wyler – worked with him under duress, for high salaries or/and brooking no interference. To read about Sten and Goldwyn or see the films she made for him is to be reminded of the inanities of an era long gone: but those of her dozen European films that I have seen might have been made yesterday.
The avove “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Anna Gaylor was born in 1932 in Paris. She made her film debut in 1956 in “Mannequins of Psris”. She did make some British films, “Seven Thunders” with Stephen Boyd and Tony Wright in 1957 and “Nor the Moon By Night” with Michael Craig and Belinda Lee. The rest of her career seems to have been based in France where she continues to act on film and television.
