Good looks can be a mixed blessing for an actor. In the case of Louis Jourdan, the romantic star who died on Saint Valentine’s Day aged 93, they guaranteed him a career both in his native France and in Hollywood, but rarely in roles that moved him out of an audience’s comfort zone. A handsome devil to say the least, he was the absolute epitome of the suave, debonair, seductive Frenchman. The camera adored him, a creature of immaculate appearance and masculine finesse.
It was his role as the bon vivant enchanted by Leslie Caron’s flibbertigibbet debutante in Gigi (1958) that made him an international star. The film won nine Oscars and made Jourdan, who sang the title number, Hollywood’s favourite Frenchman. He was cast by producer Arthur Freed when Dirk Bogarde proved unavailable, Freed having delighted in Jourdan’s performance in Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) as the louche Prince Dino, a notorious womaniser whose girlfriends become known as “Venice girls” after he takes them to Venice for romantic trysts.
Born in Marseille in 1921 as Louis Robert Gendre, the son of hotelier Henry Gendre, he rubbed shoulders with the glitterati from an early age when his father ran a seaside hotel in Cannes and assisted in the running of an early incarnation of the city’s film festival. He was encouraged by the visiting stars, and although his father’s career moved the family to Turkey and England, the latter destination provided an excellent opportunity to master the English language. Back in France, he studied acting under René Simon at the École Dramatique, and upon graduating, took his mother’s maiden name of Jourdan.
He was spotted on stage in Paris by the screenwriter and director Marc Allégret, a prodigious talent-spotter who could also claim to have discovered Gérard Philipe, Roger Vadim and Michèle Morgan. Allégret gave him work as an assistant camera operator on a drama within a drama school, Entrée des Artistes (The Curtain Rises), in 1938, as preparation for his movie debut the following year in another story of actors finding the line between work and play blurring, Le Corsaire (The Pirate). Adapted from a play by Marcel Achard, the film offered Jourdan the chance to act opposite Charles Boyer, a French star in Hollywood who Jourdan would go on to emulate. It was a hotly anticipated project, but shooting was halted after a month as France mobilised for war, and the film was never completed.
He did get to act opposite another major star, albeit a fading one, Ramon Novarro, in his eventual film debut, La Comédie du Bonheur (The Comedy of Happiness) in 1940, before war put his career on hold.
During the war, his father was a prisoner of the Gestapo, while Jourdan and his brother were active members of the Resistance, printing and distributing leaflets. He refused to appear in films propagandising Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government, a stand which made him rightly cherished when the French film industry rebuilt itself in the post-war years.
He left for Hollywood in 1946 at the invitation of David O Selznick, and made a good first impression as a man of mystery in the courtroom drama The Paradine Case (1947), a costly affair directed by Hitchcock and starring Gregory Peck. No aspiring movie star could have wished for better company to ride into town with, although the film turned out to be a disappointment. His much better second Hollywood film got him his name above the title and allowed him to add depth to another smouldering lothario: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), co-starring Joan Fontaine, is an affecting study of unrequited love that remains a powerful watch today. It was the work of another European in Hollywood, director Max Ophüls, which perhaps explains the skillful dodging of tuppeny novelette melodrama for delicate emotional exploration.
Louis Jourdan in ‘Gigi’ (Getty)He began to sense the perils of typecasting when appearing as the lover of adulterous Jennifer Jones in Vincente Minnelli’s Madame Bovary (1949), and in an attempt to break free of such roles, returned to France briefly, where he continued to play lovers, but of a slightly different style: the philandering was strictly for fun in Rue de l’Estrapade (1953) for instance, and his features lent themselves well to villainous roles when he played Doris Day’s psychotic husband in Julie (1956). However, he was by his own admission, “a star without a hit” until he surrendered to Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and then Gigi (1958), which overwhelmed his attempts to break free of light romantic leads.
His Gigi co-star, Leslie Caron, remembered that he was “one of the handsomest men in Hollywood, but not comfortable with his image”, a predicament he shared with the aforementioned Dirk Bogarde. He regularly claimed he was “Hollywood’s French cliché”, in parts that involved “mostly cooing in a woman’s ear”, Gigi in particular making him world famous as “a colourless leading man”.
He remained a bankable star in Hollywood following the success of Gigi: he followed it up with another musical, Can-Can (1960), co-starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley Maclaine, but his most interesting work was generally to be found elsewhere. His Broadway debut, in the lead role for the Billy Rose stage adaptation of André Gide’s novel The Immoralist, at the Royale Theatre in 1954, was a bold undertaking: he not only played a gay man, but worked in between a brittle James Dean and his then lover, the intense Geraldine Page. The performance won him a Donaldson Award for Best Actor.
He made his American television debut starring in the detective series Paris Precinct for ABC in 1955, but it was a medium he fared better with in Britain, where he was occasionally cast much more imaginatively – on one occasion as the persecuting husband in Gaslight, opposite Margaret Leighton, for ITV in 1960, and for Lew Grade in 1975, playing De Villefort to Richard Chamberlain’s Count of Monte Cristo.
One of the most interesting moments in his career came when Philip Saville cast him as the lead in Count Dracula (1977), a weighty BBC dramatisation that remains one of the most faithful imaginings of the source material, coming just after Hammer Films had given up the ghost. Jourdan’s casting surprised the critics, but, speaking to the Radio Times in 1977, Saville explained that he saw Dracula as “a romantic, sexually dashing anti-hero in the tradition of those figures usually dreamed up by women… Rochester, Heathcliff… figures that can overpower a strong heroine, inhuman figures that can’t be civilised.” Ahead of the game in finding romanticism in vampirism, the drama occasionally lacks bite – but Jourdan remains one of the most interesting and original Draculas in screen history.
He was the best thing in Octopussy (1983), an otherwise lousy Bond film which even lacked a memorable theme song, and bowed out with a similarly suave villain in Peter Yates’s Year of the Comet in 1992, the year he retired. Sadly, few of the roles in his final years are much to speak of.
Although his career was plentiful, it was hamstrung by poor timing and monotonous casting. Nevertheless, he was always a pleasure to watch, a naturally appealing performer. Despite his lothario image, he remained married to his childhood sweetheart, Berthe (known by the nickname Quique) for 67 years, until her death last year. They had one son, who fell victim to drug addiction and died in 1981.
Whenever he spoke in interviews of his enduring marriage, his seductive but sincere voice and passionate conviction could, in Ophelia’s words, move the stoniest breast alive, and reminded one that he was a star of the kind that they just don’t make anymore.
The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Valentina Cortese was born in Milan in 1923. She made her movie debut in Italian films in 1940. When she made the British film based in the Dolomites entitled “The Glass Mountain”, she achieved international recogniton 1949. Hollywood came calling. She made three films there of which two “Thieve’s Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill” are fine examples of film noir. She was though unhappy in Hollywood and returned to European film making. Cortese was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 for “Day for Night”. Her last film credit was in 1993..
TCM Overview:
European leading lady with dark hair and slightly sharp, Mediterranean features, in English language films from 1948 with “The Glass Mountain.” Cortese married “House on Telegraph Hill” (1951) co-star Richard Basehart in 1951 and enjoyed a prolific career in international cinema spanning over 50 years. She was especially notable as the older actress in Francois Truffaut’s affectionate, insightful, endlessly reflexive film about filmmaking, “Day for Night” (1973
Les Miserables, poster, (aka I MISERABILI), poster, Gino Cervi (top right), Valentina Cortese (center insert), 1948. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Valentina Cortese obituary in “The Guardian” in 2019.
When Ingrid Bergman received her Oscar as best supporting actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), she concluded her acceptance speech by saying: “Please forgive me, Valentina. I didn’t mean to.” She was referring to the vibrant Italian actor Valentina Cortese, who was nominated alongside her for her role in François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973).
In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.
Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.
In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.
These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.
So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.
“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”
In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.
On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.
Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.
Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.
By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”
In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).
Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.
Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).
In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.
Jackie died in 2015. Ronald Bergan
John Francis Lane writes: Among the many films in which Valentina Cortese starred during the wartime years was Quarta Pagina (1942), on which she first met the upcoming scriptwriter Federico Fellini, an “engaging, intelligent young man who scribbled the day’s dialogue on bits of paper”. It was through Cortese that Fellini cast Richard Basehart as the tightrope-walking Fool in his classic film La Strada (1954).
One of Cortese’s liveliest roles came in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, in which she appeared in the grotesque seance scene as one of the exotic friends of the eponymous medium; her character was called Valentina.
Cortese enjoyed considerable success on stage as well as on screen. Her professional and private relationship with the theatre and opera director Giorgio Strehler resulted in some of her greatest performances – and much heartache. For him she played in Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht and, most memorably, Pirandello’s unfinished The Mountain Giants, as the enigmatic actor-countess whose company never gets to perform.
She became a cult figure for addicts everywhere of high camp. Her fans in Italy even adored her in the short-lived Roman run, in 1973, of Luchino Visconti’s travesty of Harold Pinter’s Old Times. Cortese was encouraged by the ailing director to make explicit the lesbian relationship only subtly hinted at in Pinter’s original.
Though she only gets a brief mention in Zeffirelli’s autobiography – he recalls her terror of earthquakes while they were filming Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) in Umbria – Cortese was for many years a grande dame at the Zeffirelli court. On the opening night of his production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 1983, she seemed eager to replay her famous Truffaut role and forgot her lines.
• Valentina Cortese, actor, born 1 January 1923; died 10 July 2019
Catherine Deneuve was born in Paris in 1943. Her sister the late Francoise Dorlec was also an actress. She made her debut in a small role in 1957 in “Les Collegiennes”. In 1964 she made “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” which brought her international recognition. She then went on to make “Repulsion” and “Belle de Jour”. She went to Hollywood to make “The April Fools” with Jack Lemmon and “Hustle” with Burt Reynolds. However her Hollywood career was not particularly successful and she returned to Europe. She continued to have great roles in such movies as “The Last Metro” and “Indochine”. Her film career continues to-day.
Audrey Hepburn obituary in “The Independent” by David Shipman in 1993.
After so many drive-in waitresses in movies – it has been a real drought – here is class, somebody who went to school, can spell and possibly play the piano,’ said Billy Wilder. ‘She’s a wispy, thin little thing, but you’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl. Not since Garbo has there been anything like it, with the possible exception of Bergman.’ My generation knew Bergman. Garbo we had never seen. Old pictures were not easy to see in the 1950s. Older cinemagoers talked longingly of Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Margaret Sullavan and other enchantresses. From the moment Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday (1953), we knew that we had one of our own.
She was born in Brussels to an English banker and a Dutch baroness – and when the war broke out had been trapped in Arnhem with her mother; there they spent the war years, while Hepburn trained as a dancer.
Curiously, several people recognised Hepburn’s particular magic, but few British producers were interested. The revue producer Cecil Landau saw her in the chorus of a West End musical – High Button Shoes (1948) – and engaged her for Sauce Tartare. He liked her so much that he gave her more to do in a sequel, Sauce Piquant. ‘God’s gift to publicity men is a heart-shattering young woman,’ said Picturegoer, ‘with a style of her own . . .’ The magazine mentioned that some people had been to see her perform a couple of dozen times, and among them was Mario Zampi, who was about to direct Laughter in Paradise (1951) for Associated British.
The company’s casting director was equally enthusiastic, but to no avail. She was cast as a hat-check girl: the studio reluctantly allowed her three lines, as against one in the original script. She was signed to a contract, and loaned to Ealing for a couple of lines in the final scene in Lavender Hill Mob (1951), when Alec Guinness is enjoying his ill-gotten loot in South America.
At this point, the producer-director Mervyn LeRoy was looking for a patrician girl to play the lead in Quo Vadis?, MGM’s biggest production in years, and he was excited by Hepburn’s test for him. MGM were not, and the role went to Deborah Kerr. But at last Associated British realised that they might have something in this odd little girl, and they made her a vamp in a parlour-room farce, Young Wives’ Tale (1951), starring Joan Greenwood. It is completely forgotten today, but if you can see it you are likely to be beguiled by two of the most individual actresses who ever appeared in films. They had in common voices with cadences which always alighted on the wrong word to emphasise – as did Sullavan, the other Hepburn, Ann Harding, Irene Dunne, even Judy Garland – turning a statement into a question. In a word, they were never ashamed of their vulnerability; they didn’t seem to be able to cope with life – except to laugh at it. Hepburn’s child-like laugh, deep-throated but tentative, was one of her most distinctive qualities.
But, obviously, it wasn’t unique. Jean Simmons also had it. And it was Simmons who inadvertently launched Hepburn’s screen career. After Young Wives’ Tale, Associated British loaned Hepburn to Ealing again, to play the sister of the star, Valentina Cortese, in a muddled spy drama, The Secret People (1951), and then to a French company for a minor B-movie, Monte Carlo Baby (1951). Hepburn was doing a scene in a Monte Carlo hotel lobby, when Colette happened by. Colette was then working with the American producer Gilbert Miller on a dramatisation of her novel Gigi, about an innocent youngster being trained to appeal – sexually – to men. This wasn’t a subject show-business wanted to know much about. It wasn’t something Hepburn seemed to know about when she played the role on Broadway in 1951.
Meanwhile, contractual obligations prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday, and Hepburn was successfully tested. The property had been brought to Paramount by Frank Capra and when he left it was inherited by another leading director, William Wyler. It was not a likely subject for either of them but then, like many of our favourite movies – All About Eve, Casablanca – there is no other like it; it resists imitation: the innocent alone in the big city. The innocent is the princess of an unnamed European country who escapes from the embassy to see Rome incognito. She is recognised by an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck, who sees in her a good news-story and doesn’t reckon on falling in love.
She doesn’t know that he’s a reporter till they are introduced formally at a reception, when by a flicker of an eyelid he indicates that he won’t be filing the story. Peck was not the most adroit of light comedians and the direction was rather academic: but Hepburn’s sheer joy at being free and in love was wonderful to experience. You could never forget her eating an ice- cream on the Spanish Steps or putting her hand in the mouth of the stone lion at Tivoli.
The acclaim that greeted Hepburn was instantaneous and enormous – to be matched only a year later by that for Grace Kelly in what became their decade. Simmons, whom she had never met, telephoned to say, ‘Although I wanted to hate you, I have to tell you that I wouldn’t have been half as good. You were wonderful.’ Hepburn was judged the year’s best actress by the New York critics, by the readers of Picturegoer and by the voters of the Motion Picture Academy. Paramount had Hollywood’s brightest new star – only it didn’t: she was under contract to Associated British, which came to a lucrative agreement by which Paramount had exclusive rights to her services.
Billy Wilder directed her in Sabrina (1954), in which she was the chauffeur’s daughter, moving from ugly duckling to glamour, which was a formula followed in several subsequent movies. The plot had her loved by two brothers, played by William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart got her at the end, establishing another pattern to follow, in which she was wooed by men twice her age: by Fred Astaire in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), Paris fashions and the Gershwins’ music; by Gary Cooper in Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), Paris again and a rather vulgar remake of Canner’s delicate Ariane; and Cary Grant in Donen’s Charade (1963), Paris yet again and Hitchcockian situations.
You could understand why these actors took the risk of being described as cradle-snatchers. Astaire said: ‘This could be the last and only opportunity I’d have to work with the great and lovely Audrey and I wasn’t missing it. Period.’ Leonard Gershe, who wrote Funny Face, described her as a joy to work with, ‘as professional as she was unpretentious’. Hollywood’s best directors also clamoured to work with her. King Vidor said that she was the only possible choice to play Natasha in the expensive Italo-American War and Peace (1956), causing William Whitebait in the New Statesman to observe, ‘She is beautifully, entrancingly alive, and I for one, when I next come to read (the book), shall see her where I read Natasha.’ But Tolstoy had done the job for him: physically, temperamentally Hepburn was Natasha.
About this time she might have played another literary heroine. James Mason knew that he would make a superb Mr Rochester, but 20th Century-Fox would only proceed with the project if he could persuade Hepburn to play Jane. He didn’t even try. As he explained: ‘Jane Eyre is a little mouse and Audrey is a head-turner. In any room where Audrey Hepburn sits, no matter what her make- up is, people will turn and look at her because she’s so beautiful.’ Of the many films she turned down the most interesting are MGM’s musicalised Gigi, in her old stage role (and the studio was prepared to pay her far more than Leslie Caron, who was under contract, and who did eventually play the role), and The Diary of Anne Frank, George Stevens’s version of the Broadway dramatisation. She said that that would have been too painful after her own experience of the Occupation (in the event the role was so disastrously cast that the film failed both artistically and commercially).
At the same time Hepburn accepted another difficult subject, with another fine director, The Nun’s Story, for Fred Zinnemann. Kathryn Hulme’s novel was also based on fact, about a novice who finds, in the end, that she doesn’t have enough faith to continue. The film remains Hollywood’s best attempt at playing Church, both because it regards it with respect and not piety, yet at the same time allowing us to make our own decisions about the dottiness of the convent system. She held her own against the formidable opposition of Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, both playing Mothers Superior with closed minds – and that was partly because the gentle Zinnemann was nevertheless able to blend their different acting styles, and partly because of Hepburn’s innate instinct for what the camera would allow her to do. Despite her voice mannerisms, here at a minimum, Hepburn was the one star of her generation to suggest intelligence and dignity – which is to say qualities which people, as opposed to actresses, have. Grace, beauty and the sine qua non of stardom made her as rewarding to watch as Garbo, and she can’t disguise them in playing this ordinary girl; but she also has gravity.
She was touching as Burt Lancaster’s half-breed sister in John Huston’s huge, vasty western The Unforgiven (1960), but Blake Edwards allowed the latent artifice of her screen persona to surface as Holly Golightly in his film of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Capote described the result as ‘a mawkish Valentine to Audrey Hepburn’ and George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay, criticised her for refusing to convey the fact that Holly was a tramp with no morals or principles. No one else seemed to mind.
She had committed herself to the film only after Marilyn Monroe had turned it down, and when there was an impasse with Alfred Hitchcock over No Bail for the Judge. He was desperate to work with her and had spent dollars 200,000 in preparation, when she had second thoughts about a scene in which she was dragged into a London park to be raped. Furious, Hitchcock abandoned the picture rather than go ahead with another actress.
Hepburn was a controversial choice to play Eliza in My Fair Lady (1964). Warners had paid a record sum of dollars 5.5m for the screen rights to the Lerner and Loewe musical version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Everyone agreed that its extraordinary success was due to the starring trio of Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway. The last of these was the most expendable, but Jack Warner decided to go with Holloway when James Cagney wisely declined to come out of retirement to play Doolittle. No leading star was prepared to risk a comparison with Harrison’s definitive Higgins (‘Not only will I not play it,’ said Cary Grant, ‘I won’t even go and see it if you don’t put Rex Harrison in it’) which meant Andrews had to be replaced by a solid box-office attraction.
Warners had recently released The Music Man with its Broadway star Robert Preston, but the film’s reception was so spotty that they had not opened it in territories where he was an unknown quality. The irony of the My Fair Lady situation was that, as filming was under way, word was coming from the Disney studio that Andrews was sensational in Mary Poppins. She got an Oscar for it; Harrison got one for My Fair Lady, presented by Hepburn, and was thus photographed with his two Elizas. That Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed did not help her performance (her non-singing voice had done charmingly by the songs in Funny Face), but she brought a street-wise cunning to the role that Andrews lacked. This may not have been what Shaw intended, but George Cukor, who directed, observed that at the end of the film Hepburn fitted Shaw’s own description of Eliza as ‘dangerously beautiful’.
She made only two more successful films: Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), with Albert Finney, a study of a disintegrating marriage written by Frederic Raphael, and Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), a thriller about a blind girl terrorised by some thugs because they thought there were some drugs stashed away in her apartment. Mention should be made of two other movies, because they were directed by Wyler: How to Steal a Million (1966), a comedy with Peter O’Toole, and The Children’s Hour (1962), a remake of his own These Three. The original Broadway play hinged on a lie told by a child, that two of her teachers have an unnatural affection for each other. The censor would not permit that in 1936, so the plot of the film depended on the child accusing one teacher of filching the other’s fiance. Wyler’s decision to remake the picture was to restore the lesbian element, but the result was flat, despite the fact that Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were infinitely better actresses than Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, the stars of the 1936 version.
At the height of her career Hepburn made only one out-and-out stinker, Green Mansions, with Anthony Perkins. It may be that WH Hudson’s novel about Rima the Bird Girl is unfilmable (MGM had started shooting one a few years earlier before giving up), but matters here were made worse by the stodgy direction by Mel Ferrer, at that time married to Hepburn. They had met while appearing in Giraudoux’s Ondine in New York in 1954, and he accompanied her to Italy, to play Prince Andrei in War and Peace. When the marriage broke up in 1968 she married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, and announced that a career and marriage were incompatible; so she only intended to film again if she could do so near her homes in Rome and Switzerland.
She came out of retirement five times, and only the first time was worthwhile: to play an ageing Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). She was an industrial heiress in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, which was so badly received that she admitted that she had done it because she liked the director, Terence Young. She added that she wanted to go out on a good one – and Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed certainly didn’t provide it. Nobody laughed, including Time-Life, who financed it and dropped it after a few test showings. In 1987 she made a telemovie, Love Among Thieves, and although she herself was praised the press liked neither it nor her co-star, Robert Wagner. In 1989 she played a small role in Always, Steven Spielberg’s remake of A Guy Named Joe, in the role done in the original by Lionel Barrymore as an emissary of the Almighty. She was realistic enough to recognise that there were few meaty roles for actresses of her age – and with Spielberg’s box-office record she hoped to be in a success. She was wrong again.
3rd September 1955: British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) is featured for the cover of Picture Post magazine. Original Publication: Picture Post Cover – Vol 68 No 10 – pub. 1955. (Photo by IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
She was by now spending most of her time working voluntarily for Unicef and giving interviews to explain what she was doing and what was needed. Unlike some stars whose identification with charities always looked suspicious, as if they wanted to advance their careers, it was clear that in this case there was no career and she wanted to find something useful to do. She also appeared frequently at movie functions, to be awarded lifetime achievement awards or make the special presentation at the end of the evening. Many people had expected her to age badly, because she had been so scrawny as a young woman. The reverse was the case – for she still possessed in middle age what she had always had: radiance, dignity and, above all, style. This last quality may be summed up by a famous exchange of the 1950s, when her clothes were designed by one of the most celebrated couturiers in Paris. ‘Just think what Givenchy has done for Audrey Hepburn.’ ‘No, just think what Audrey Hepburn has done for Givenchy.’
Corinne Calvet obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.
Corinne Calvet was born in Paris in 1925. She made her Hollywood debut opposite Burt Lancaster in “Rope of Sand”. She starred opposite some of the major stars e.g. James Stewart in “The Far Country”, ” Alan Ladd in “Thunder in the East”, James Cagney in “What Price Glory” and Danny Kaye in “On the Rivera, Her last film was “The Sword and the Sorcerer” in 1982. Corinne Calvet died in Los Angeles in 2001
“Guardian” obituary:French actress who built a glamorous career in Hollywood
Corinne Calvet, who has died aged 76, was one of the very few French actresses with an extensive career in Hollywood. Only Leslie Caron could claim to have made as many American movies. But, whereas Caron played up her asexual gamine qualities, Calvet brought serious oo-la-la to her roles.Almost all Calvet’s pictures were made in the 1950s, when Hollywood used foreign stars to appeal to the diminishing international market. In 1952, Calvet filed a million-dollar slander suit against Zsa Zsa Gabor, charging that Gabor had told a leading Hollywood columnist, among others, that she was not actually French. The case was thrown out, but Calvet’s origins were found to be genuine.
She was born Corinne Dibos in Paris into a wealthy family. Her mother was one of the scientists who contributed to the invention of Pyrex glassware. A bright pupil, Corinne studied criminal law at the Sorbonne before turning to acting. (She had appeared at the age of 12 in a short film about billiards called Super Cue Men.)
“A lawyer needs exactly what an actor needs, strong personality, persuasive powers and a good voice,” she remarked years later. Unfortunately, Hollywood being Hollywood, it seldom utilised these qualities in her.
After the Sorbonne, she appeared in a few stage productions and a couple of post-war French features, before coming to the attention of producer Hal Wallis. Calvet’s Paramount movies for Wallis were largely mediocre, including her debut film Rope Of Sand (1949), a South Africa-set adventure yarn. As the only woman in a cast that included Burt Lancaster and Claude Rains, the curvaceous 23-year-old Calvet could not help but be noticed. Also in the cast was handsome 27-year-old John Bromfield, whom she soon married.
This didn’t stop Wallis from making a play for her, suggesting he would help her husband’s career. “I had his destiny between my legs,” Calvet said of Bromfield. She rebuffed Wallis, who punished her by cancelling Bromfield’s contract and putting her in My Friend Irma Goes West (1950) starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. “I couldn’t believe he would cast me in such a script,” she recalled in anger.
“Rope of Sand had made me a valuable property,” she said. “Doing this film would ruin my chances of rising higher as a dramatic star.” What she objected to most were her scenes with an amorous chimpanzee. Wallis cast her again opposite Martin and Lewis in Sailor Beware (1952) against her will.
Calvet’s few films made for Darryl F Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox were somewhat better, two of them under John Ford, though they were among the director’s weakest works: When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950), in which she played a French underground leader who woos soldier Dan Dailey, and as a vivacious barmaid fought over by soldiers Dailey and James Cagney in What Price Glory? (1952). Also at Fox, Calvet was a spirited partner of Danny Kaye in a nightclub act in On The Riviera (1951).
Back at Paramount, Calvet, at the behest of Wallis, vainly attempted comparison with Marlene Dietrich in Peking Express (1951), a lame remake of Shanghai Express, updated to Red China. Meanwhile, after playing opposite Alan Ladd in Thunder In The East (1953), Calvet divorced Bromfield, explaining that “he had an addiction to sex, which he needed to satisfy in order to sleep”. Her second marriage was to minor actor Jeffrey Stone.
Now free from the Hal Wallis contract, Calvet was better used in two films for Universal in 1955: So This Is Paris, adding some spice to the insipid musical of three sailors on leave in Paris, and The Far Country, one of Anthony Mann’s finest westerns. In the latter, unusually, she plays a hoydenish freckle-faced girl in checked shirt and jeans, for whom James Stewart gradually falls.
In the 1960s Calvet went into semi-retirement, appearing only in a few TV shows between another three marriages and liaisons. In 1967 her longtime boyfriend, millionaire Donald Scott, sued her to recover assets that he had put under her name in an effort to hide them from his wife in a divorce battle. He claimed that Calvet had used voodoo to control him, but their differences were settled after a bitter two-week trial.
In the 1980s, Calvet made a brief comeback as a victim of Oliver Reed in Dr Heckle and Mr Hype (1980), and in The Sword And The Sorcerer (1982). In 1983, the actress, who is survived by a son from her fourth marriage, attacked the way Hollywood misused her in her memoirs, Has Corinne Been a Good Girl? Readers and filmgoers were left to make up their own minds as to the answer.
Corinne Calvet, actress; born April 30 1925; died June 23 2001
“Her fans compared her with Garbo. C.B. Cochran proclaimed her ‘the greatest actress in the world’ and many critics agreed. But then such as been the happy lot of several middle European actresses. In films, Elisabeth Bergner with her pixie features and gurgling infectious laughter was pure drindl.” – David Shipman in “The Great Movie Stars – The Golden Years”. (1970).
Elisabeth Bergner was born in Drohobycz (which is now part of the Ukraine) in 1897. She established herself as a Shakespearian actress on the Continent. In the early 1930’s she moved to London and gained favourable notices for her performance on stage in “The Boy David” by J.M. Barrie.She made the film “Escape Me Never” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.
She made one film in Hollywood “Paris Calling” in 1941. Throughout the remainder of her career she acted on stage while making the occasional film. The character Margo Channing in “All About Eve” is rumoured to have been based on Elisabeth Bergner. She died in 1986 in London. An extensive review of Ms Bergner’s career on “The Jewish Woman’s Chronicle” can be found here.
“Quinlan’s Movie Stars”:
Polish born actress with wispy blonde hair whose brief popularity in England failed to survive long under the triple strain of her own advancing years, her quickly outdated persona (elfin, fey, almost little-girlish) and the imminence of 40s realism. Margaret Sullavan had much the same trouble. She did her best acting work in later years in the theatre. Married to director Paul Zinner. Was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in “Escape Me Never”.
TCM overview:
A fey, wistful, international stage and screen star, Elisabeth Bergner rose to prominence in 1924 playing the title role in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”. Considered one of the finest actresses of her generation, this blonde performer entered films in Germany in 1923 but her career was cut short by the rise to power of the Nazis. In 1933, Bergner and her husband, the Czech director Paul Czinner, fled to Britain where she continued to alternate between stage and screen.
ESCAPE ME NEVER, Elisabeth Bergner, 1935
In the United Kingdom, Bergner landed her first English-language production, the title role in the biopic “Catherine the Great” (1934), although it was banned in Nazi Germany for featuring “emigre Jews”, cutting into its box office potential. She did earn a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of an unwed mother who marries a ne’er-do-well composer in “Escape Me Never” (1935) and offered a memorable Rosalind opposite Laurence Olivier in “As You Like It” (1936)
. Relocating to the USA, Bergner enjoyed greater success on stage but only made one Hollywood film, “Paris Calling” (1942), an exciting story of the French Resistance movement.
After touring Australia, the actress returned to Europe where she found it difficult to find decent screen roles. Indeed, it was over 20 years before she was again before the cameras, ironically in Germany, in “Die Gluckliche Jahre der Thorwalds” (1962). She was already past 70 when she played a witch summoning Satan to avenge Vincent Price in the British-made “Cry of the Banshee” (1970) and her last big screen appearance was in the 1982 German-language “Feine Gesellschaft”.
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Lilli Palmer was a sophisticated German actress who made many Hollywood and international films from the 1930’s up to the 1980’s. Her first major breakthrough came in British films and she went with her husband Rex Harrison to Hollywood in 1945. Notable films she made there included “Clock and Dagger” with Gary Cooper , “Body and Soul” with John Garfield and “But Not for Me” with Clark Gable. In Britain in 1959 she made “Consipracy of Hearts” as the mother superior of an Italian convent hiding Jewish children from the Nazi. She published her autobiography “Change Lobsters and Dance”. Lilli Palmer died in Los Angeles in 1986. Interesting blog on Lilli Palmer can be found here.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A charming, elegant and exceedingly popular international film star with a gentle, understated beauty, actress Lilli Palmer was born on May 24, 1914, as Lillie Marie Peiser, the daughter of a German-Jewish surgeon and Austrian-Jewish actress. In addition to her native German, she grew up becoming fluent in French and English as well. Of her two sisters, older sister Irene Prador became an actress and singer in her own right. Lillie studied drama in Berlin and made her theatrical debut there in 1932 at age 18. Within a short time, however, the family was forced to flee their native homeland with the rise of Hitler and settled in Paris. Eventually Lilli moved to England to rebuild the career she had started on stage and film.
She made her British movie debut co-starring in the “B” mystery drama Crime Unlimited(1935), playing the distaff member of a syndicate of jewel thieves who becomes a romantic pawn for a policeman (Esmond Knight) who has infiltrated the crime ring as a plant. Throughout the rest of the decade she upped the value of her name in both “A” and “B” material, notably Alfred Hitchcock‘s Secret Agent (1936), Silent Barriers (1937) and The Man with 100 Faces (1938) where she provided the usual element of feminine mystery.
Lillie’s career took a major upswing during the early to mid 1940s. Several of her pictures centered around the omnipresent war, particularly Thunder Rock (1942), her film career-maker), which starred Michael Redgrave as an anti-fascist journalist who retreats to Canada, and Notorious Gentleman (1945), with Rex Harrison as a idle bounder who sees the error of his ways and becomes a war sacrifice. This was Lilli’s first movie with husband Harrison; they married in 1943 and she bore him a son, Carey Harrison, the following year. Carey grew up to became a writer and director.
EVT5775999 THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY, poster art, l-r: Fred Astaire, Lilli Palmer, Debbie Reynolds, Tab Hunter; (add.info.: THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY, poster art, l-r: Fred Astaire, Lilli Palmer, Debbie Reynolds, Tab Hunter); Everett Collection.Torpedo Bay, poster, l-r: James Mason, Lilli Palmer on poster art, 1963. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
The family moved to America in 1945 to further their careers. Rex and Lilli became a prominent acting couple, appearing together on the early 50s Broadway stage with “Bell, Book and Candle” (1950), “Venus Observed” (1952) and “The Love of Four Colonels” (1953), the last mentioned directed by Harrison. In movies, they co-starred in the murky crimer The Long Dark Hall (1951) and the vastly superior The Four Poster (1952), which later gave rise to the musical adaptation “I Do! I Do!”. Lilli was award the Venice Film Festival Award for this performance and represented herself well with other handsome male acting partners, notably Gary Cooper in her debut American film Cloak and Dagger(1946) and John Garfield in the classic boxing film Body and Soul (1947), leaving audiences enthralled with one of its newer foreign imports. At one point, she was given her own own (short-lived) TV show to host, The Lilli Palmer Show (1953).
Somewhat typecast by this time as heartless cads and opportunists on film, “Sexy Rexy”, as husband Harrison was known in the tabloids, developed quite a reputation off-camera as well. A particularly disastrous romance with actress Carole Landis led to that actress’s tragic suicide in 1948. Lilli took the high road and came off the better for it in the public’s eye. She eventually called it quits, however, with both Harrison and Hollywood and returned to Europe in 1954. In 1956 Lilli filmed Between Time and Eternity (1956) [Between Time and Eternity] and fell in love with handsome Argentine co-star Carlos Thompson, who had developed matinée idol status in Germany. They married in September of 1957, several months after her divorce from Harrison became final. This marriage endured.
Lilli matured gracefully in films, the epitome of poise and class, but she lost any potential for top stardom after leaving Hollywood. She made international productions for the rest of her career, primarily German and French, but they did not live up to her early successes and were not seen all that much outside of Europe. She managed to work, however, opposite a “Who’s Who” of European male stars of the time, including Curd Jürgens, James Mason, Louis Jourdan, Jean Gabin, Jean Marais, Jean Sorel, Gérard Philipeand Klaus Kinski. Of those few movies she made in Hollywood, she played the prickly wife of Clark Gable, who has a May-December affair with young Carroll Baker in But Not for Me (1959); was a sparkling and witty standout in the ensemble cast of The Pleasure of His Company (1961); and proved quite moving in the William Holden spy thriller The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). On TV here, she was touchingly effective as Mrs. Frank in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank (1967) with Max von Sydow, and enjoyed one of her last roles in the acclaimed miniseries Peter the Great (1986).
Lilli Palmer
The final decade and a half played out rather routinely with supporting roles in such films as diverse as Oedipus the King (1968), De Sade (1969), and The Boys from Brazil (1978). She demonstrated her writing talents with her popular bestselling biography “Change Lobsters and Dance” in 1975, and later published a novel “The Red Raven” in 1978. Dying of cancer in 1986 at age 71 in Los Angeles, Lilli’s surviving second husband Thompson, who had abandoned acting in the late 60s and turned to turned TV writing/producing, committed suicide four years later back in his native Argentina.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Jean-Pierre Aumont obituary in “The Guardian” in 2001.
In 1934, the tall, handsome, muscular, blond-haired and blue-eyed Jean-Pierre Aumont, who has died aged 92, auditioned for the lead in Marc Allégret’s Lac aux Dames. As the role was that of a swimming instructor at a mountain lake resort, the director and his lover, André Gide, felt justified in asking the young French actor to strip. Aumont was immediately offered the part that made him a star. In the film, he is involved with three women; a former girlfriend, a rich socialite and a mysterious child of nature, Simone Simon. It reflected Aumont’s own life, in which he had the reputation as a ladies’ man. While in Hollywood, he had brief flings with Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly and Barbara Stanwyck, and was engaged to Hedy Lamarr. His three marriages were to actresses Blanche Montel, Maria Montez and Marisa Pavan.
Born Jean-Pierre Salomons into a wealthy Parisian French family – his father owned a chain of department stores – Aumont followed his actress mother’s calling at the age of 16, studying drama at the Paris Conservatory and making his stage debut at 21. His first film, a year later, was Jean de la Lune (1931), and his career took off in 1934 with Lac aux Dames, and as Oedipus in the first production of Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale.
In the next few years, Aumont worked with some of the great names of French cinema: Madeleine Renaud and Jean Gabin in Julien Duvivier’s Maria Chapdelaine (1934), Harry Baur in Taras Bulba (1936), and Michel Simon and Louis Jouvet in Marcel Carné’s Drôle de Drame (1937), set in Edwardian London, in which he played an amorous milkman. Carné cast him again in Hotel Du Nord (1938), where he and Annabella were immensely touching as a young couple in a suicide pact.
Just as he was becoming established, war broke out. Aumont served with the Free French forces in Tunisia, Italy and France, earning the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre for his bravery. By 1943, he had moved to Hollywood, where he got a series of unchallenging roles as archetypal Frenchman. His first was in Assignment In Brittany (1943), as a pilot sent to occupied France to pose as a Nazi agent of which Variety magazine commented: “Aumont is good looking enough to suit the femmes, and he underplays agreeably.” In the same year, he appeared in The Cross of Lorraine, playing a French soldier in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
In 1946, Aumont married Montez, with whom he had a daughter, Tina Aumont, who became an actress. Aumont himself starred in an outrageously camp biopic, Song Of Sheherazade (1947), in which he played mariner Rimsky-Korsakov, writing melodies for a dancer (Yvonne de Carlo) in a Moroccan nightclub. “Me, oh, my, sounds like the buz- zing of a bee,” she says of one of his numbers. A year later, he and Montez co-starred for the only time in Siren of Atlantis. Aumont played a legionnaire who falls hopelessly in love with Montez as the cruel ruler of a legendary lost city. After the tragically premature death of Montez at the age of 31, Aumont retired from acting for two years. He returned in Lili (1953), as the dashing magician who infatuates waif Leslie Caron. From then on, he became an international star, moving easily between Europe and America. He was in two of Sacha Guitry’s all-star historical comedies, Si Versailles m’était Conté (1954) and Napoléon (1955), in the epic John Paul Jones (1959) with his third wife, Marisa Pavan, and supported Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra in The Devil at 4 O’Clock (1961).
Digital Camera
In 1962, Aumont played opposite Vivien Leigh in the Broadway musical, Tovarich. Though neither was a skilled dancer or singer, they got by on sheer personality in the roles of Russian royals exiled in Paris. Leigh was in one of her blackest periods, and Aumont helped her through until the run ended because of her mental breakdown.
Few of Aumont’s films were particularly distinguished over the next decades, some exceptions being Sidney Pollack’s Castle Keep (1969), in which he played an impotent aristocrat, and François Truffaut’s Day For Night (1973), where he was the charismatic male lead who dies during the shooting. He also dies halfway through Claude Lelouche’s Cat And Mouse (1975), playing Michèle Morgan’s philandering husband.
Jean-Pierre Aumont
Aumont continued to work through the 1990s, appearing in James Ivory’s Jefferson In Paris (1995) and in Ismail Merchant’s The Proprietor (1996), still exuding the dignity and charm for which he was known in real life.
Jean-Pierre Aumont, actor, born January 5 1909; died January 30 2001.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian” can be accessed here.
Oliver Tobias has an international film and television career. He was born in Switzerland and came to live in Britain at the age of eight. In 1968 he starred in the London production of “Hair”. His first film role was in “Romance of a Horse Thief” with Yul Brynner. He scored a big success as King Arthur in 1972 in “Arthur of the Britons”. He made “Luke’s Kingdom” in Australia directed by Peter Weir. Another successful series was “Smuggler” set in Cornwall.
Gary Brumburgh’s entry:
A remote and rather prevailing sullenness has only enhanced the mystique and charisma found in dashingly handsome Oliver Tobias, who has enjoyed over a three decade-long career on stage, screen and TV. Born Oliver Tobias Freitag in Zurich, Switzerland on August 6, 1947, he was the son of Swiss actor Robert Freitag and German actress Maria Becker, who subsequently divorced when he was young. Living in England from age 8, he was sent to boarding school and was later encouraged by his mother to study at the East 15 Acting School (1965-1968) which coincided with dance training at the Ecole de Dance in Zurich. In 1968 he appeared in the original London production of “Hair” playing the prime rebel role of Berger. The following year he starred, staged and choreographed the rock opera in Amsterdam and again helmed a production in 1970 in Tel Aviv. Oliver continued his shaggy-haired, counterculture musical career with the role of Judas in a German touring company of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Around this time he started making an impression in films with the international productions of Romance of a Horsethief (1971), _Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1971)_, which co-starred Charlotte Rampling, and The God King (1974) in a Mephistophelean-styled role. On TV he enhanced a number of classic, age-old stories from Sherlock Holmes to Robin Hood. He earned TV stardom as King Arthur in the series Arthur of the Britons(1972), then again played the youthful ruler of Camelot in King Arthur, the Young Warlord (1975) on film. From there he graced a number of colorful costumers, includingArabian Adventure (1979) and on TV portrayed composer Johann Strauss in an equally colorful outing. Despite this attention he did not give up his musical roots, showing his prowess in the title role of the rock opera “Peer Gynt” in Zurich, and in the role of The Pirate King in “The Pirates of Penzance” at London’s Drury Lane Theatre.
As a stretch he also appeared as Bassa Selim in the Mozart opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio” in 1988 and 1989, then appeared in a non-musical, the powerful AIDS drama “The Normal Heart,” shortly after. Oliver’s taste in movies have been eclectic to say the least, and not always tasteful. He appeared in Joan Collins‘ scurrilous, soft-core flick The Stud (1978) as an amorous waiter who sleeps his way to the top, and was part of the cast in the costumed romp Mata Hari (1985) which focused more on the disrobing of its star Sylvia Kristel than anything else.
For variety he portrayed a Vietnam veteran in Operation Nam(1986), a galactic dictator in Nexus 2.431 (1994), and a U-boat captain in The Brylcreem Boys (1998). In 1999 he again returned to musical limelight, this time in London as King Roderick in “La Cava,” based on the Dana Broccoli novel. He returned to the role a second time in 2001. In 2003 he was Percival Brown in the 50th anniversary production of “The Boyfriend” and the very next year toured in the rock musical “Footloose.”
Divorced from Camilla Ravenshear, he has two daughters, Angelika and Celeste. In 2001 he married Polish-born Arabella Zamoyska. The rugged charmer is in the process of writing a tell-all autobiography.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
