European Actors
Renato Salvatori was born in 1934 in Italy. He worked with the great Italian directors including Visconti, Rossellini and De Sica. While making “Rocco and his Brothers” in 1962 he met the French actress Annie Girardot whom he married.He died in 1988 at the age of 54. His MDB page can be accessed here.
Micheline Presle was born in Paris in 1922. She made her film debut in 1937 in “La Fessee”. She went to Hollywood in 1950 when she signed a contract with 20th Century Fox”. The U.S, films she made were “Under My Skin” with John Garfield and “An American Guerrilla in the Phillipines” with Tyrone Power. She was back in France in 1954 and quicly resestablished her position in French film making. In 1962 she returned to Hollywood to make “If A Man Answers” as Sandra Dee’s mother. She continues to act on film and her most recent appearance was in “Venus Beauty Institute”.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
Dark-haired, Paris-born Micheline Presle (better known in the States as Micheline Prelle) was the daughter of a businessman and took acting classes as a teen. She was discovered by Georg Wilhelm Pabst and cast in Young Girls in Trouble (1939) (Young Girls in Distress) and Four Flights to Love (1940) in which she played a dual role.
She proceeded to make films during the Occupation, and by 1947, was deemed an important young French star, with Devil in the Flesh (1947) (Devil in the Flesh) gaining her world-wide attention. Her marriage to American actor-turned-producer William Marshall in 1950 led her to attempt Hollywood pictures. None of her pictures, which included Under My Skin (1950), American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950) and Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), the last one produced and directed by husband Marshall, endeared her to American audiences; however, despite co-starring opposite top Hollywood stars John Garfield, Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn. Divorced by 1954, she never adjusted to the Hollywood way of life and returned willingly to Paris with her daughter, actress/directorTonie Marshall.
She continued to reign supreme in French films and has appeared frequently on the stage as well. Some of her post-Hollywood films include House of Ricordi (1954) (House of Ricordi), Royal Affairs in Versailles (1954) (Royal Affairs in Versailles), Her Bridal Night (1956) (The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful), Demoniqque (1958), King of Hearts (1966) (King of Hearts), Donkey Skin (1970) (The Magic Donkey),Le journal du séducteur (1996) (Diary of a Seducer) and Les Misérables (1995).
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
2013 Video clip of Ms Presle here.
Lilo Pulver was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1929. She undertook acting classes at the Bern conservatory.
She made her film debut in 1951 and by the end of that decade was starring in international films like “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” with John Gavin, “One, Two, Three” with James Cagney and Horst Buchholz and “A Global Affair” in 1963 with Bob Hope. Her final acting role was in 1986 in the mini-series “Le Tiroir secret”. Her “Wikipedia” page can be accessed here.
Article from Swiss Community:
That contagious laugh! No report about Liselotte (“Lilo”) Pulver is ever complete without reference to the ever-popular Swiss actress’s trademark laughter. Pulver’s 90th birthday in October was no exception. Although Pulver has now withdrawn from public life and lives in a retirement home in Berne, her city of birth, she marked her big birthday with the publication of “Was vergeht, ist nicht verloren” (What passes is not lost) – a book containing personal memoirs based on old photos, letters and notes. Having kept all her mementos, Pulver – born in 1929 to middle-class parents – has now decided to tell the story of a long life that few could have expected. It was not until after visiting commercial college that the young Pulver was allowed to take acting lessons. She would go on to have a glittering international career. It was especially in post-war Germany where the smiling Swiss belle became a star of the silver screen, thanks to films like “I Often Think of Piroschka”. The Swiss public took her to their hearts in the 1950s, when she played the wholesome maid Vreneli in the Gotthelf adaptations “Uli the Farmhand” and “Uli the Tenant”. She later proved how talented and versatile an actress she was in the French New Wave film “The Nun” – and in American director Billy Wilder’s comedy “One, Two, Three”, in which she pulls off a dancing tabletop parody of Marilyn Monroe. In her private life, Pulver took some hard blows, with her daughter committing suicide and her husband dying of a heart attack. However, the 90-year-old recently denied press reports claiming that she was very lonely. “I am very satisfied with my life overall,” she said, adding that she still has plenty of reasons to burst into that legendary laughter every day
Lil Dagover was born in Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in 1887. At the age of ten, she was sent back to Europe to continue her education in Germany and Switzerland. She made her silent screen debut in 1913. By the early 1920’s she was one of the most prominent actresses of the Weimar Republic. In 1932 she went to Hollywood to make “The Woman from Monte Cristo” with Walter Huston. She returned to Germany and made films there through the 30’s and right through World War Two. Towards the end of her career she made two films directed by the Austrian actor Maximillian Schell. “The Pedestrian” also starred such venerable actresses as Peggy Ashcroft, Elisabeth Bergner and Francoise Rosay. “The End of the Game” starred Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland and Jacqueline Bisset. She died in 1980 in Munich at the age of 92. Her “Wikipedia” page is here.
Sonja Henie was born in 1912 in Oslo, Norway to a very wealthy family. From an early age she practiced ice skating and she was a competitor in the 1924 Winter Olympics at the age of eleven. She won her third Olympic title at he 1936 Games. After the Games she became a professional ice skater. While performing in Los Angeles she was signed to a contract by 20th Century Fox. Her first film was “One in a Million”. The peak of her cinema career was between 1936 and 1943 and her films included “Thin Ice”, “Happy Landings”, “Sun Valley Serenade”, “Iceland” and “Wintertime”. She was a hugely popular star and made ice skating also popular. Ten years later Esther Williams was to do the same thing with swimming. Sonja Henie concentrated on ice skating revues after her film career waned. She retired from ice skating in 1956. She invested wisely and was a very wealthy woman when she died while en route by place to Oslo in 1969 at the age of 57.
TCM Overview:
Winner of the Olympic Gold medal in figure skating an impressive three times in a row (1928, 1932, 1936), Henie came to Twentieth Century-Fox shortly after her last win and was built up as a popular star. Nearly a dozen light musical comedies offered the blonde and dimpled Henie plenty of opportunities to don her blades and perform in lavish ice ballets while her leading men beamed and a cast of supporting comics clowned around. When her film career petered out in the mid-1940s she turned to performing in live ice shows.
“Vanity Fair” article on Sonja Henie can be accessed here.
Madys Christians was born in Vienna, Austria in 1892. She made her first film “The Black Hussar” in Germany in 1932. In Hollywood four years later she starred in “Come and Get It” with Frances Farmer. On Broadway she had an enourmous success with “I Remember Mama” in 1944. On film she had fine roles in 1948 in “All My Sons” and “A Letter to an Unknown Woman” which was directed by Max Ophuls. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and died in 1951.
From All Movie Guide: Primarily an actress of the European and American stage, she also appeared in many German and Hollywood films. Christians came to the U.S. in 1912 to appear with her parents in a German-speaking theater they established in New York. After making one film in the States, Audrey (1916), she returned to Germany to study with Max Reinhardt. In the ’20s she starred in numerous German plays and films, plus a few Broadway productions. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, she returned to America for good, shuttling between Hollywood and Broadway. In films she tended to play supporting character parts, while on stage she continued to find lead roles. Late in her career she was blacklisted after being labeled a communist sympathizer during the McCarthy-era “witch trials.” ~ Rovi
Jean-Marc Barr was born in 1960 in Germany. His father was American and served in the military in the Second World War. He began working in theatre in France in 1986. John Boorman cast him in “Hope and Glory” with Sarah Miles the following year. Then he had amajor role in the very succesful “The Big Blue”. He has made several films with the Danish director Lars von Trier including “Europa”, “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogsville”. 2013 interview with Jean-Marc Barr here.
TCM Overview:
Extraordinarily handsome, classically trained actor who made his film debut as Absalom in Bruce Beresford’s 1985 biblical bomb, “King David.” Fluent in several languages, Barr earned his first leading role as champion diver Jacques Mayol in Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue” (1988), a huge hit in France which failed to find an international audience.
He enjoyed more success on the arthouse circuit with his fine work as the hapless hero of Lars von Trier’s stunning WWII film, “Zentropa” (1991). Barr also did well as an American scholar who travels to Tahiti to do research on Gaugin and forms an odd relationship with an amiable con man in “The Imposters” (1994), and reteamed with von Trier for the striking epic romance “Breaking the Waves” (1996).
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Michèle Morgan, who has died aged 96, was one of France’s top film stars of the 1940s and 1950s; said to have the most beautiful eyes in cinema, her career might have been still more stellar had a studio wrangle not caused her to lose the lead in Casbalanca to Ingrid Bergman,
She shot to fame at 17 with her first important role in Gribouille (1937) as a young woman on trial for murdering her lover. Its impact was such that RKO offered her a Hollywood contract but Morgan preferred to stay in France. Marcel Carné’s proto-noir Le Quai de Brumes created even more of a stir the next year, pairing runaway waif Morgan, in a beret and trenchcoat, opposite Jean Gabin’s deserter.
“You know you have beautiful eyes,” he says. “Kiss me,” she replies. By the time of Remorques (1940), she and the newly-divorced Gabin were an item on and off-screen and they left for America together after the German invasion. There he left Michèle Morgan for Marlene Dietrich and she discovered that RKO did not know what to do with her.
“Hollywood crushed my personality,” she said later. “They tried to make me look like everybody else – and then they photographed me badly.” Yet even so her clear blue, Garboesque gaze had got her noticed. Hitchcock wanted her for Suspicion but her poor English counted against her (“I said ‘crying trees’ for ‘weeping willows’”). She was also first choice for Ilsa Lund in Casablanca but Warners refused to pay the loan fee that RKO demanded.
She did get to star with Bogart in the forgettable Passport to Marseille (1944) and in Frank Sinatra’s acting debut, Higher and Higher. In 1942, she married another singer-turned-actor, William Marshall, but when they separated after only a few years she returned to France with their son.
Marshall later married Ginger Rogers. Meanwhile in 1946, Michèle Morgan re-established her réclame by being named best actress at the first Cannes Film Festival for her role as a blind orphan in La symphonie pastorale. She also featured as the girlfriend of butler Ralph Richardson in Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948).
Two decades later, the French-style farmhouse house that she and Marshall had built in Los Angeles was the site of the murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife, and four others by members of Charles Manson’s gang.
The eldest of four, Michèle Morgan was born Simone Renée Roussel at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, on February 29 1920. Her father was a perfume company executive but the crash of 1929 ruined him and the family moved to Dieppe. There he opened a grocer’s. This soon failed and at 15 Simone ran away to Paris to live with her grandparents. They paid for acting lessons and she changed her name in 1937, saying she did not have the body of a Simone.
She was at the peak of her fame in the 1950s, and was 10 times voted France’s most popular actress. She played a series of historical heroines – Joan of Arc, Josephine Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette – before showing towards the end of the decade in Marguerite de la Nuit and The Mirror has Two Faces that she could portray darker figures.
The advent of the New Wave largely ended her career and she concentrated thereafter on painting and briefly on a tie-making business. Her last role of note was in Claude Lelouch’s Cat and Mouse.
“I have never had the opportunity to play sexy women,” she reflected. “I must believe that my charm was not in my arse.”
She was predeceased by her third husband, the director Gérard Oury, and by her son.
Michèle Morgan, born February 29 1920, died December 20 2016
“Wikipedia entry:
Camilla “Milly” Vitale (16 July 1933, Rome, Italy – 2 November 2006, Rome, Italy) was an Italian actress. She was the daughter of conductor Riccardo Vitale and choreographer Natasha Shidlowski.
She appeared in numerous post-war Italian films. She appeared in a few Hollywood movies but never achieved star status like her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. In her most notable U.S. role, she appeared with Bob Hope as “Madeleine Morundo Foy” in The Seven Little Foys (1956). War and Peace She married Vincent Hillyer, a United States citizen, in 1960; the marriage produced two sons, Edoardo and Vincent Jr. The couple divorced in the late 1960s. Vitale retired from acting in the 1970s, after a career of more than 47 films.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
