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European Actors

Collection of Classic European Actors

Giuletta Masina
Giuletta Masina
Giuletta Masina

 

“Independent” obituary by David Shipman from 1994:

Giulia Anna Masina, actress: born Giorgio di Piano, Italy 22 February 1920; married 1943 Federico Fellini (died 1993); died Rome 23 March 1994.

THE ADJECTIVE which has been over-used to describe Giulietta Masina is ‘Chaplinesque’, as she laughed through the tears which cascaded down her clown’s face. There had been no female star before quite like her, and she had the world at her feet when she appeared in La Strada (1955), prepared for her and directed by her husband, Federico Fellini.

There was a decided difference of opinion about the movie: it was either a calculated assault on our tear-ducts or it was a poetic essay on the lot of strolling players in rural Italy. There were moments when you caught your breath, when Fellini captured the beauty and tranquillity of small Italian towns at night, and there were moments when he reached too far back to the traditions of commedia dell’arte.

He sculpted another monument to the comic-tragic abilities of his wife in Le Notti di Cabiria (1957). These abilities were genuine. As the critic Paul Dehn wrote, after noting that she ‘deserves a single name as surely as Garbo or Chaplin’, ‘She is a miniature version of the hope which still persists in a bloody world: and the world itself would be lost if it did not love her.’

There seldom was a more optimistic hooker than the one played by Masina in Cabiria (as the film was best-known abroad), though the adjective in this case might be obtuse, for the viewer knows – if she doesn’t – that the nice, respectable man (Francois Perier) to whom she has loaned her nest-egg will abscond with it. The enormous success of both films typecast her. She played the role again in Eduardo de Filippo’s Fortunella (1958) and for Julien Duvivier in La Grande Vie (1959).

Masina lacked the demonic power of her contemporary (and co-star, in Nella Citta l’Inferno, 1958) Anna Magnani. On both sides of her brief reign of acclaim she was fated to play the role of the heroine’s friend or confidante – in for instance Alberto Lattuada’s brilliant study of conditions in post-war Italy, Senza Pieta (1948), helping her fellow whore Carla Del Poggio, and Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), comforting her fellow socialite Ingrid Bergman. There was no chance here for the pyrotechnic displays of her later star vehicles, but she showed herself an artist of resource, integrity and dignity. Between La Strada and Cabiria Fellini gave her another chance to underplay, in one of his best and least pretentious films, Il Bidone (1955), an engaging comic melodrama about the retribution dealt out to con-men, including Broderick Crawford and Richard Basehart. Masina’s role, as Basehart’s wife, was not of long duration, but you could agree with the hyperbole evoked by the critic of Time and Tide – ‘She is one of those performers you can’t bear to tear your eyes from’ – though he was in this case reviewing Cabiria.

Cabiria brought Masina a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival, but the failure of a handful of co-productions with France and Germany spoiled her chances of an international career. She was one of the victims of the mass-murderer Landru (1963) in Claude Chabrol’s comedy-thriller, but with much less footage than some of the others, who included Michele Morgan and Danielle Darrieux. She was on screen for about the same time in her only English-language film, the disastrous The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), but as one of Katharine Hepburn’s coven she was one of the few names of the starry cast (Danny Kaye, Charles Boyer, Richard Chamberlain) to emerge with credit.

When Fellini really attracted world attention with La Dolce Vita in 1960 Masina was busy enough being his wife and chatelaine – roles she played for him on screen in Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965), a follow-up to his autobiographical 8 1/2 , even more fantastical and self-indulgent. Her few later films only contain one role of consequence, when she starred opposite Fellini’s frequent alter ego Marcello Mastroianni in Ginger e Fred (1985), yet another of his obsessive studies of the hollow dreams and aspirations of those besotted with show business.

That was where they came in. His first film with her and his first as director was Luci del Varieta (1950), a tale of a tatty touring company which played to mixed results in the country’s shabbier halls. It was one suffused with melancholy, made with a wit and compassion many feel were missing from his later films. And Masina was touching and discreet. It was a far cry from the junketings of Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965).

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

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Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid

New York Times” obituary from 1992:

Paul Henreid, the suave leading man who won screen immortality as the noble, Nazi-battling Resistance leader Victor Lazlo in the 1942 film classic “Casablanca,” died on Sunday at Santa Monica Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 84 years old and lived in Pacific Palisades, Calif.

He died of pneumonia after a stroke, said Henry Alter, Mr. Henreid’s former secretary. The family did not want to announce the death until Mr. Henreid was buried yesterday in Santa Monica, Mr. Alter said yesterday.

The actor died only days before the first major theatrical re-release of “Casablanca” in more than 35 years, scheduled for April 10 as part of the film’s 50th-anniversary celebrations. Despite that movie’s classic status, however, Mr. Henreid may be best remembered for a scene in “Now Voyager” (1942) in which he lit two cigarettes at once as he comforted Bette Davis. Mr. Henreid later said that the director, Irving Rapper, didn’t like that bit of business and went along with it only reluctantly.

Mr. Henreid once estimated that he had acted in or directed more than 300 films and television dramas. In his heyday as a leading man, the 6-foot-3 actor seemed to represent the prototype of the Continental lover to American film audiences: aristocratic, elegant and gallant. A Charmed Childhood

Mr. Henreid was born on Jan. 10, 1908, in Trieste, then a part of Austria. His full name was Paul George Julius von Hernreid. He was the son of Baron Carl Alphons, a prominent Viennese banker, and Maria-Luise von Hernreid.

In his 1984 autobiography, “Ladies Man,” written with Julius Fast, he described what he called a charmed childhood among the aristocrats of pre-World War I Vienna. But by 1927, when Mr. Henreid graduated from the exclusive Maria Theresianische Academie, little of the family fortune remained.

He wanted to be an actor but, bowing to his family’s wishes, worked with a publishing house in Vienna for four years while studying acting at night. During an acting-school performance, he was discovered by Otto Preminger, then Max Reinhardt’s managing director, and became a leading player in Reinhardt’s theater. Like the fictional Victor Lazlo, Mr. Henreid was a staunch anti-Nazi during his years in Europe. A Series of German Roles

In 1937 he won wider recognition by playing Prince Albert in “Victoria Regina” on the London stage. Despite his personal sentiments, he was fated for a time to play a series of German roles. In one of his first films, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1939), he played a young German teacher; he was a Nazi officer in “Madman of Europe” (1940) and a Gestapo agent in Carol Reed’s “Night Train” (1940).

Mr. Henreid’s first big American success was in another such role, that of the bombastic German consul in the Guild Theater production of “Flight to the West.” The play opened in New York on Dec. 30, 1940, and helped get him his first Hollywood contract, with RKO Radio Pictures in 1941. Later that year, Mr. Henreid became a United States citizen, but he resisted the studio’s attempt to change his name to Herndon or Henrie.

He broke free of the Germanic stereotype in his first Hollywood film, “Joan of Paris” (1942), in which he played a heroic Free French R.A.F. pilot, and went on to glory as the underground leader in “Casablanca.” He then played an Irish patriot in “Devotion” (1943) and a Polish count in “In Our Time” (1944). A Survivor of the Blacklist

In his autobiography, Mr. Henreid said his Hollywood film career was all but destroyed by the anti-Communist blacklist. Mr. Henreid was one of a group of Hollywood stars who went to Washington to protest the excesses of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.In the 1950’s, Mr. Henreid found a second career as a director and producer. He directed more than 80 episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” for television; Hitchcock hired him in 1955 despite the blacklist.

Mr. Henreid also acted in numerous television films and toured nationally in the play “Don Juan in Hell” in 1972 and 1973.He is survived by his wife, Lisl, and two daughters, Mimi Duncan and Monica Henreid

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Max Von Sydow
Max Von Sydow
Max Von Sydow

Max Von Sydow obituary in “The Guardian” in 2020.

The great Swedish film and stage actor Max von Sydow, who has died aged 90, will be remembered by different people for different roles: the title role in The Exorcist, Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his Oscar-nominated part as the slave-driven Lasse in Pelle the Conqueror, but his passport to cinema heaven will be his many remarkable performances under the direction of Ingmar Bergman.

The tall, gaunt and imposing blond Von Sydow, pronounced Suedov, made his mark internationally in 1957 as the disillusioned 14th-century knight Antonius Block, in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Returning from the crusades to his plague-stricken country, he finds that he has lost his faith in God and can no longer pray. Suddenly, he is confronted by the personification of Death. Seeking more time on Earth, he challenges Death to a game of chess. Von Sydow’s portrayal of a man in spiritual turmoil demonstrated a maturity beyond his years and was to exemplify his solemn and dignified persona in further Bergman films, even extending to some of his less worthier enterprises.

Although it was the actor’s first film for Bergman, they had worked together at the Municipal theatre in Malmö on several plays and would continue to do so between films. From 1956 to 1958, for Bergman, Von Sydow played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust. In the same company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, who, with Von Sydow, were to become part of the Bergman repertory company of the screen.Advertisement

He was born Carl Adolf Von Sydow – later taking the name Max – to an academic family in Lund, southern Sweden. His father, Carl Wilhelm, was an ethnologist and professor of comparative folklore at the university of Lund; his mother, Maria Margareta (nee Rappe), was a school teacher.

He attended a Catholic school before doing his military service. From 1948 to 1951, Von Sydow attended the acting school at the Royal Dramatic theatre in Stockholm; while still a student there, he had small parts in two films directed by Alf Sjöberg, Only a Mother (1949) and Miss Julie (1951). After graduating, Von Sydow, who had married Christina Olin in 1951, joined the Municipal theatre in Helsingborg before moving to Malmö, which resulted in the significant meeting with Bergman.

Following The Seventh Seal, Von Sydow played in six sombre films in a row for Bergman; he was quite content to play supporting roles when asked. He had a small part in Wild Strawberries (1957), and was rather peripheral in Brink of Life (1957), as Eva Dahlbeck’s husband, waiting calmly for his wife to have a baby (which she loses), but was central in The Face (1958, later known as The Magician). As Vogler, a 19th-century mesmerist and magician, Von Sydow embodies admirably the part-charlatan, part-messiah character.

It was back to medieval Sweden in The Virgin Spring (1960), with Von Sydow as the vengeful father of a girl who has been raped and murdered. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961), he was the anguished husband of Harriet Andersson, watching his wife lapsing into insanity, and in Winter Light (1962), he was a man terrified of nuclear annihilation.

Von Sydow refused offers of work outside Sweden, even the title role in the first James Bond movie, Dr No (1962), though two decades later he played the evil genius Blofeld to Sean Connery’s Bond in Never Say Never Again, 1983. He finally gave in when George Stevens begged him to play Jesus in his 225-minute epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). However, despite Von Sydow’s charisma, the epic turned out to be Jesus Christ Superbore.

His next two Hollywood movies were not much better: The Reward (1965), in which he was an impoverished crop-dusting pilot trapped in the Mexican desert, and Hawaii (1966), as an unbending and arrogant missionary who makes no effort to understand the islanders. Von Sydow’s two sons played his son in the film, aged seven (Henrik), and 12 (Clas). The scheming German aristocrat in The Quiller Memorandum (1966) was the first of many bad Germans he would play well.

Complex roles in four films for Bergman temporarily stopped the rot: as an artist subject to terrible nightmares and hallucinations in Hour of the Wolf (1968); as a big, gangling innocent forced to face reality in Shame (1968), a powerful parable in which he was allowed to improvise some of his dialogue for the first time; as a man whose peaceful seclusion is disturbed by a woman recovering from the car accident that killed her husband and son (Liv Ullmann), as well as a warring couple and a homicidal maniac in The Passion of Anna (1969); and as the cold cuckolded doctor husband of Bibi Andersson in The Touch (1971), Bergman’s first English-language film.

Von Sydow and Ullmann suffered beautifully as poor Swedish peasants trying to survive in 19th-century Minnesota in Jan Troell’s diptych, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). It was almost inevitable that Von Sydow should be cast as the Jesuit priest, Father Merrin, in William Friedkin’s pretentious shocker The Exorcist (1973) after having gone through so many metaphysical crises in Bergman films. His craggy features haunt the film and its shoddy sequel The Exorcist II – The Heretic (1977).

On the whole, his films tended to oscillate between the serious and the silly. Among the former were Steppenwolf (1974), in which he played Hermann Hesse’s alter ego Harry Haller, a disillusioned man going on a spiritual journey; Duet for One (1986), in which he was the callous, death-fearing psychoanalyst; and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where he was a prickly, antisocial artist. Allen has said that the only two actors he directed of whom he found himself in awe were Von Sydow and Geraldine Page.

On the more ridiculous side were his Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980), and King Osric in Conan the Barbarian (1982), through which he managed to keep a straight face – and there was no straighter face in films than Von Sydow’s.

He felt much more in his element in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which won the best foreign film Oscar. Von Sydow elegantly captured the simple grandeur of an illiterate widowed farmer who leaves a poverty-stricken Sweden for a Danish island with his nine-year-old son, to find himself almost a slave on a farm.

Von Sydow reconnected with Bergman when he played the latter’s maternal grandfather in The Best Intentions (1992), directed by August from Bergman’s autobiographical script.

However, his portrayal of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun (1996), directed by Troell, was far too sympathetic for a man who tried to rationalise his admiration for Hitler.

“Why me?” was Von Sydow’s reaction to the director Jonathan Miller, after he had been cast as Prospero in The Tempest at the Old Vic, in 1988. “Do you have to cross the river to fetch water when you have so many wonderful actors in England?” But Miller was justified in his choice because Von Sydow brought the aura of the Bergman films to the role as well as authority and warmth.

In 1988, he directed Katinka, a simple tale about a woman stifled by a loveless marriage, which made little impact. Von Sydow was glad to have made it, but said that he would never direct again. He continued to alternate between mainstream Hollywood (he was in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, 2002), and more challenging material such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), mostly in small scene-stealing roles.

He was a sinister German doctor in Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller Shutter Island (2010); a mysterious mute in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), for which he received his second Oscar nomination; Lor San Tekka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015); and the Three-Eyed Raven in the sixth season of Game of Thrones (2016). His last film role came in Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk (2018).

He and Olin divorced in 1979; in 1997 he married the French film-maker Catherine Brelet, and they settled in Paris (Von Sydow became a French citizen in 2002). He is survived by Brelet and their sons, Cédric and Yvan, and by Henrik and Clas, the sons of his first marriage.

• Max von Sydow (Carl Adolf von Sydow), actor; born 10 April 1929; died 8 March 2020

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Claude Dauphin
Claude Dauphin & Ronald Lewis
Claude Dauphin & Ronald Lewis

IMDB Entry:

In 1930, Claude, who was a stage-struck set designer at the Oden Theater, a repertory house in Paris, learned an ailing actor’s part in two hours and took it over without a rehearsal. Tristan Bernard, the famous French playwright and producer took notice of this feat. He engaged Dauphin for the leading role of his next play “La fortune” was was also made into a film the next year. Dauphin’s next break came when Charles Boyer left for American movies. As Boyer left for America, Dauphin succeeded in the Henri Bernstein organization, outstanding stage producers of Paris. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, Dauphin starred in several plays as well as sixty five French made pictures. Dauphin received his elementary education at Ecole Fenelon and high school at Lycee Condorcet. he also graduated from Lycee Louis de Grand in literature and philosophy, all of these school located in Paris. Between 1940 and 1945, he was a solider in the French and allied armies. he was a lieutenant in the French tank service and shuttered later in life at his memories of that kind of grisly warfare. After the fall of France, he organized his own stock company and toured non-occupied cities and small towns. he was also serving in the French underground movement. Threatened with exposure, he escaped by buying a small fishing boat in the south of France and sailing to Gibraltar. After reaching London in 1942, he first served with the British Secret Service and then joined the Free French forces of DeGaulle. Claude quickly learned English, of which he was devoid of, and became a liaison officer between the French LeClerc division and the press corps of the American Army of General Patton. Because of this association, he was one of the first to enter Paris on Liberation Day. Dauphin’s American film debut was in the movie “Deported” produced largely in Italy. He later appeared in many stage productions on Broadway including “No Exit” and “Happy Time”. He later had a screen test with Warner Bros. and then returned to France. Having almost forgotten about the test, he was summoned to Hollywood for “April in Paris” starring Doris Day and Ray Bolger.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Bill Hafker thehuntzie@yahoo.com

The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

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Odile Versois

Odile Versois

Odile Versois

IMDB entry:

Docile, delicately beautiful, light-haired Parisian actress Odile Versois was born Katiana de Poliakoff-Baidaroff on June 14, 1930, the second of four Poliakoff sisters, all of whom became renown actresses in their own right. From an artistic family (her father was opera singer Vladimir de Poliakoff), Versois began her career as a child ballerina with the Paris Opera Corps de Ballet. She subsequently turned to film acting at age 18 and proved a natural with a major debut in The Last Vacation (1948) [The Last Vacation]. Of the numerous films in which she undertook leading lady parts, she moved audiences most with her portrayals of fragile, often tragic heroines in romantic drama. Her more notable pictures include Paolo e Francesca (1950), Beautiful Love (1951) [Beautiful Love], the title role in Domenica (1952), Grand gala (1952) and director/actor Robert Hossein‘s Night Is Not for Sleep (1958) [Nude in a White Car], which also co-starred sister Marina Vlady — known for her sultry roles. Versois also provided lovely distraction in British films in the 1950s in_A Day to Remember (1953)_, David Knight in Chance Meeting (1954) [aka Chance Meeting], Alec Guinness in To Paris with Love (1955),Anthony Steel in Checkpoint (1956) and Room 43 (1958) starring Diana Dors and Herbert Lom.

She matured in taut crime dramas and lively costumers in the 1960s, notablyRendezvous (1961) and Swords of Blood (1962) the latter starring a swashbuckling Jean-Paul Belmondo. She also worked on the French, Belgian, Swiss and North African stages and on television, lending some touching performances toward the end, particularly in the films Églantine (1972) and Le Crabe-Tambour (1977). Dogged by ill health, she was seen less frequently into the 1970s and passed away of cancer a week after her 50th birthday, a gentle, beautiful soul gone before her time.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.ne

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Maria Casares

maria casares.

maria casares.

John Calder’s obitury on Ms Casares in “The Independent”:

Maria Casares was the most outstanding French tragic actress of her generation. She was born in Spain but, because of enforced exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War, her career was entirely on the French stage and screen.

Unlike her seniors Edwige Feuillere and Madeleine Renaud, she brought an atavistic and foreboding sense of tragic destiny to her performances that made her unsuitable for comedy and the lighter theatre. She carried on the tradition of Sarah Bernhardt in performing the great roles of Greek tragedy and of the French classical theatre, Phedre being one of her most outstanding performances, but she also played a multiplicity of parts in plays by Ibsen and early moderns and by contemporary playwrights including Brecht, Genet, Anouilh, Sartre, Camus, Claudel and Edward Bond among others. She introduced J.M. Synge to the French public with a legendary production of Deirdre of the Sorrows in 1942 under the German occupation and shortly afterwards made her screen debut as Dubureau’s wife Nathalie in Marcel Carne’s great film Les Enfants du Paradis (1943). She was 21 at the time.

Although she made many films and her electrifying presence, with its dark beauty, innate smouldering passion and controlled violence – and most unforgettably of all her expressive eyes – made her an instant star, ideally suited to the cinema, she was happier and more at home in the theatre. No one could portray evil, especially evil destiny, better than she – Medea and Lady Macbeth were only two of the parts that gave her such opportunities – but she is well remembered, and still can be seen, in Jean Cocteau’s classic films, Orphee (1949) and Le Testament d’Orphee (1959), where she played Death.

The timeless quality of her mythological roles was unique. She was an actress of great intelligence and her autobiography, Residente privilegiee (referring to the words on her French identity card), published in 1980, testifies to her intellectual breadth, political commitment and literary skill. Like Proust she was able to bring her past, especially her early Spanish experiences, into the present, through an association of objects, places, people and allusions, so that her book is a series of fragments linked by memory.

Her knowledge and sense of history helped her to understand the events and motivations that lay behind so many of the roles she played, and she became a real avatar of her characters on stage and screen. During the Spanish Civil War she had been, at the age of 14, a voluntary nurse in Madrid hospitals, working to exhaustion tending the wounded, aware of real tragedy hourly before her eyes, and of the particularly Spanish stoic courage and mordant humour displayed by the suffering and dying Republican defendants of the city. Her father, Santiago Casares Quiroga, was a member of the Republican government, and in 1936 he and the whole family just managed to flee to France before the border was closed.

The next six years were difficult for the family, staying in cheap hotels with little money, but Maria Casares learned French and on her 20th birthday, in the Theatre des Mathurins, she opened in Deirdre of the Sorrows, her first part, to immediate fame; and thereafter never looked back.

Her incredible eyes, that could express anger, scorn, hatred or the menace of eternity, but also love and incandescent passion, her noble bearing, which made her so suitable for the great female dramatic parts, and her deep expressive voice attracted all the major playwrights of the day, and she was in constant demand both for modern plays and by the great state-funded drama companies, the Comedie-Francaise and Jean Vilar’s Theatre National Populaire (TNP), to play the classics. She was with the former company from 1952 to 1954, and opened the first seasons of the Avignon Festival with Vilar, which introduced her to many Shakespeare parts.

She subsequently joined the TNP where she starred with Gerard Philipe in Le Cid and in many other plays, touring America and Europe as well as playing in Paris. She appeared many times with the Renaud-Barrault company in their seasons at the Odeon and during Jean-Louis Barrault’s later odyssies in improvised theatrical spaces, after de Gaulle removed the subsidy in 1968.

Maria Casares was a private person who liked to return to her house in the country to prepare her parts, think and read. She married another actor, “Dade” Schlesser, in 1978, with whom she had played together on the stage for many years, especially at the TNP, where he was only junior to Vilar; he was an Alsatian of gypsy origin. His sardonic sense of humour – during the war he was imprisoned for five days for saying to a German officer with a straight face that he had never heard of Adolf Hitler – and philosophical bent, exactly matched her own, and he became the companion of her later years. She was on the stage until only a few months before her death.

John Calder

Maria Casares, actress: born La Coruna, Spain 21 November 1922; married 1978 Dade Schlesser; died Paris 22 November 1996.

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ABOUT ME

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.

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