Pier Angeli was born in 1932 and was an Italian-born television and film actress. Her American cinematographic debut was in the starring role of the 1951 film Teresa, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Young Star of the Year – Actress. She had one son with Vic Damone, her first husband, and another son with Armando Trovajoli, her second husband. Her twin sister is the actress Marisa Pavan.
During the 1960s and until 1970, Angeli lived and worked in Britain and Europe, and was often screen-credited under her birth name, Anna Maria Pierangeli. Her performance in The Angry Silence (1960) was nominated for a Best Foreign Actress BAFTA, and she was reunited with Stewart Granger for Sodom and Gomorrah (1963), in which she played Lot’s wife. She had a brief role in the war epic Battle of the Bulge (1965). 1968 found Angeli in Israel, top billed in Every Bastard a King, about events during that nation’s recent war.
According to Kirk Douglas‘ autobiography, he and Angeli were engaged in the 1950s after meeting on the set of the film The Story of Three Loves (1953). Angeli also had a brief romantic relationship with James Dean. She broke it off because her mother was not happy with their relationship as he was not Catholic.
Angeli was married to singer and actor Vic Damone from 1954 to 1958. During their marriage, they appeared as guests on the June 17, 1956 episode of What’s My Line?. Their divorce was followed by highly publicized court battles for the custody of their only child, son Perry (1955–2014).
Angeli next married Italian composer Armando Trovajoli in 1962. She had another son, Howard, in 1963. She and Trovajoli were separated in 1969.
In 1971, at the age of 39, Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills. She is interred in the Cimetière des Bulvis in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France.
Marisa Pavan was born in Sardinia in 1932 and is the twin sister of the actress Pier Angeli. Pavan’s breaktrough role came in 1955 as the daughter of Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” based on the play by Tennessee Williams.
Pavan was nominated foran Oscar for her performance. She was married to the late French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.
TCM Overview:
The twin sister of actress Pier Angeli, Marisa Pavan was generally cast in gentle roles during her brief career as a leading lady of 1950s films. The attractive, Italian-born brunette made her motion picture debut in John Ford’s 1952 remake of “What Price Glory?”, playing a sweet village girl, and followed as a doomed Native American in love with Indian fighter Alan Ladd in Delmar Daves’ “Drum Beat” (1954).
Pavan won a Golden Globe Award and earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as the sensitive teenaged daughter of the formidable Anna Magnani in “The Rose Tattoo” (1955).
She held her own in the costume epic “Diane” (also 1955), in which she competed with Lana Turner for the affections of Roger Moore.
In Nunnally Johnson’s “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1956), Pavan brought warmth and believability to her role as the war-time love of Gregory Peck.
After appearing opposite Tony Curtis in the taut mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957) and two more costume epics, “John Paul Jones” and “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the actress retired from the big screen for more than a decade.
A mini-biography on Marisa Pavan can be viewed on the TCM website here.
Marisa Pavan died at her home in France in 2023 at the age of 91.
The Hollywood Reporter obituary in 2023:
Maria Luisa Pierangeli and her sister (birth name Anna Maria Pierangeli, who was older by a few minutes) were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Their father, Luigi, was an architect and construction engineer, and their mother, Enrica, was a homemaker who once dreamed of being an actress.
“My mother adored Shirley Temple and took us to see all her movies,” Pavan said in Jane Allen’s 2002 book, Pier Angeli: A Fragile Life. “She even dressed us like Shirley Temple, hence the big bows in our hair.”
The family moved to Rome in the mid-1930s and was threatened when the Nazis occupied the city.
When she was 16, Anna was strolling along the Via Veneto on the way home from art school when she was discovered by Vittorio De Sica, and she portrayed a teenager on the verge of a sexual awakening opposite him in Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950). That brought her to the attention of MGM, which cast her in Teresa (1951), signed her to a seven-year contract and gave her the stage name Pier Angeli.
Angeli and her sister then moved to Los Angeles, and Maria, with no acting experience, was signed by Fox. Newly christened Marisa Pavan, she made her big-screen debut as a French girl in John Ford’s World War I-set What Price Glory (1952), starring James Cagney and Dan Dailey.
Pavan then appeared in 1954 in the film noir Down Three Dark Streetsand in the Western Drum Beat, starring Broderick Crawford and Alan Ladd, respectively, before she broke out in The Rose Tattoo.
Pavan also co-starred in a pair of epic adventures released in 1959, playing Robert Stack’s love interest in John Farrow’s John Paul Jones(1959) and the servant Abishag in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba(1959). In the latter, she worked alongside Yul Brynner, who joined the film in Spain after the sudden death of Tyrone Power.
Pavan worked mainly in television after that, with stints on such shows as The United States Steel Hour, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, Combat!, The F.B.I., Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files.
Marisa Pavan and Tony Curtis on the set of 1957’s ‘The Midnight Story’ COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
In 1976, she appeared as Kirk Douglas‘ mentally ill wife in the Arthur Hailey NBC miniseries The Moneychangers, and she played Chantal Dubujak, mother of crime lord Max DuBujak (Daniel Pilon), in 1985 on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Angeli, who dated James Dean before she married singer Vic Damone and portrayed the wife of champion boxer Rocky Marciano (played by Paul Newman) in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, died in 1971 at age 39 of a barbiturate overdose at a Beverly Hills apartment. It was never firmly established whether she died by suicide or suffered a reaction to prescribed medication.
Pavan was married to French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (her castmate in John Paul Jones) from 1956 until his 2001 death. Survivors include her sons, Jean-Claude (a cinematographer) and Patrick, and her younger sister, Patrizia Pierangeli, also an actress
Rosanna Schiaffino obituary in “The Guardian” in 2009.
Rosanna Schiaffino who has died aged 69, was one of those Italian beauty queens who began a promising acting career in the post-neorealist cinema of the 1950s. She gave up the cinema in the 1970s and married the handsome playboy and steel industry heir Giorgio Falck. Their marriage and, a decade later, their break-up and divorce, had overtones of melodrama more piquant than the content of any of the 45 films in which Schiaffino had starred.
She was born in Genoa, in north Italy, into a well-off family and, although her father wanted her to pursue studies as a surveyor, her mother encouraged her showbusiness ambitions, helping her to study privately at a drama school and then to take part in beauty contests, which she usually won. These led to modelling jobs, with photographs in important magazines, including Life.
At the age of 27, she was offered her first film roles, which brought her to the notice of the producer Franco Cristaldi, who launched many of the stars and directors of that era. He paired her with Marcello Mastroianni in Un Ettaro di Cielo (A Hectare of Heaven, 1959), shown at the Brussels and Edinburgh festivals. More significant was her second film for him, La Sfida (The Challenge), directed by Francesco Rosi, which was well received at the 1958 Venice festival, where Schiaffino was much admired for her powerful but sensitive performance as a Neapolitan girl, inspired by a real-life character. On the day of her wedding to the young man with whom she has been having a passionate affair (the part was played by the Spanish actor José Suarez), he is killed by the Camorra, which he has been trying, ingenuously, to outwit for control of the fruit market.
In 1959, she starred in Mauro Bolognini’s La Notte Brava, one of the first films co-scripted by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was not too happy about the casting of French actors such as Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Claude Brialy to play his Roman toughies, but approved of the choice of the actresses, Elsa Martinelli and Schiaffino. In 1962 she appeared in Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town. But though the publicists had tried to launch Schiaffino as an “Italian Hedy Lamarr”, she was unlucky. She would have been more appropiately heralded as the new Italian sex goddess after Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, but in the early 1960s that role was passing to Claudia Cardinale, who would later marry Cristaldi, with whom Schiaffino still had a contract. Indeed, in 1960 Schiaffino was to have played Paolina Borghese in a new Abel Gance film about Napoleon, but Cristaldi, who was co-producer, secured the role for Cardinale.
Schiaffino found another producer interested in her career, Alfredo Bini, whom she would marry. In Bini’s 1963 production RoGoPaG (named after its four directors, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti), although Pasolini’s episode La Ricotta would be most remembered, Schiaffino showed her mettle in Rossellini’s Illibatezza (Chastity). She gave credibility and humour to the role of an air hostess who succeeds in shaking off the advances of an American PR guy looking for the perfect chaste girl for an advertising campaign, by turning herself into a vampish glamourpuss.
A more explicitly erotic role for her was that of Lucrezia, the heroine of one of the most salacious plays of Renaissance theatre, Niccolò Machiavelli’s masterpiece La Mandragola (The Mandrake), banned for centuries by the Vatican, which Alberto Lattuada adapted into an over-the-top Italian comedy in 1965, with the comedian Totò, with whom Rosanna had played in an earlier film, as the cunning priest who convinces her to accept an artful stratagem for cuckolding her husband. Schiaffino won the only acting honour of her career for this performance.
In 1966 she played a lead role in two international productions set up by Bini, neither of which would give lustre to their careers. One was a biopic, El Greco, filmed in Toledo with Mel Ferrer in the title role, made by a director, Luciano Salce, who was more at home with satirical comedy. The other was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Rover, directed by Terence Young, in which Schiaffino co-starred with Anthony Quinn and Rita Hayworth.
After another 15 films, none of them particularly notable, in 1976 she decided to give up the cinema and divorced Bini, with whom she had had a daughter. She began a new life with the jet set, and during the summer of 1980, in Portofino, met Falck, who had also just divorced. Their affair was big news for the gossip columnists. In 1981 she gave birth to their son, Guido, and in 1982 they were married in Milan’s city hall by the mayor. Their marriage and its gradual decline after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1991, and the subsequent divorce, led to unpleasant recriminations on both sides over the custody of their son and the inheritance, but they came to an agreement before Falck died in 2004.
Schiaffino is survived by her daughter, Antonella, and her son.
• Rosanna Schiaffino, actor, born 29 November 1939; died 17 October 2009
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Tribute
2014
Seductive, dark-haired Italian beauty Rosanna Schiaffino never quite made the big time, but she co-starred in an array of features from both Europe and Hollywood, working with some of the finest directors along the way. A talented actress, she brought glamour and flair to a host of European adventures and popular Art-house features.
Born in Genoa, Italy on November 25th 1939, Rosanna was a teenage beauty queen, then model before being propelled into movies and dubbed the ‘Italian Hedy Lamarr’. A promising start came in Francesco Rosi’s realistic drama ‘The Challenge’, where Rosanna gave a sensitive portrayal of a real-life Neapolitan whose husband is murdered by the Mafia on their wedding day. Schiaffino impressed again the following year in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘The Big Night’ (’59), as an aimless teenager on a wild trip through the streets of Rome. A sword and Sandal flick followed with ‘Romulus and the Sabines’ (’61), which was an early vehicle for Roger Moore, in which Rosanna played the beautiful goddess Venus.
In 1962 Rosanna got her Hollywood break with a small ingénue role in Vincente Minnelli’s ‘Two Weeks in another Town’, starring Kirk Douglas and Edward G. Robinson. She was then Vince Edwards’ love interest in Carl Foreman’s epic war drama ‘The Victors’ (’63), and Sidney Poitier’s wife in Jack Cardiff’s colourful adventure ‘The Long Ships’ (’64), starring Richard Widmark. A black-comedy followed with Ken Hughes ‘Drop Dead Darling’ (’66), playing the target of Tony Curtis’s lady-killer, which featured a standout turn from Lionel Jeffries as Curtis’s valet. Back on home turf Rosanna had the starring role in the interesting Nunsploitation picture ‘A Nun at the Crossroads’ (’67), as the beleaguered Sister Maria, battling an uprising in the Belgium Congo alongside John Richardson’s caring doctor.
A good role followed when she appeared alongside Anthony Quinn in Terence Young’s high seas adventure ‘The Rover’ (’67), playing an unstable girl pursued by Quinn’s stranded sailor. Rosanna was excellent in the obscure 1969 drama ‘Check to the Queen’ (aka ‘The Slave’), as an actress and model who takes in a young assistant (a cute Haydée Politoff) who secretly harbours perverse desires. Both actresses look stunning and the movie is a very good tale of decadence among the high-classes. A sex flick followed with the bawdy comedy ‘In Love, Every Pleasure Has Its Pain’ (’71), which starred popular Italian lead Nino Manfedi as a peasant who agrees to help his friend marry his ideal woman (Schiaffino) on condition that he can share her once they’re wed.
After playing a nymphomaniac in Enzo G. Castellari exploitation piece ‘Hector the Mighty’ (’72), Rosanna co-starred with Richard Crenna and Stephen Boyd in the under-rated western ‘The Man Called Noon’ (’73), as a damsel-in-distress who falls for Crenna’s amnesiac gunslinger. Rosanna then top-lined and even stole the show, in the cult mystery ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ (’74), a neat giallo with a supernatural twist. By now Schiaffino’s career was in a steady decline, and she was now taking supporting roles in exploitation fare such as Jorge Grau’s silly sex comedy ‘Back of the Store’ (‘75).
In 1976, after ten years of marriage to film producer Alfredo Bini, Schiaffino left her husband and quit the movies after beginning an affair with playboy heir Giorgio Enrico Falck. Now happy among the jet-set and with a newborn son, the couple married in 1982. Personal problems and Rosanna’s cancer diagnosis in 1991, led to their breakdown and later divorce, before Falck died in 2004. Sadly, Rosanna later died after her long battle with breast cancer, in Milan on October 17th 2009, aged 69.
A capable actress, Rosanna Schiaffino was also a tabloids dream who adorned the covers of Life magazine around the world. A sensual beauty who was prone to scandal and who could be difficult on set, she nevertheless livened up a number of classy productions in a wide variety of roles.
Favourite Movie: Check to the Queen Favourite Performance: The Killer Reserved Nine Seats
Ingrid Bergman won three Oscars, “Gaslight”, “Anastasia” and “Murder on the Orient Express. She began her career in her native Sweden and became a top Hollywood star in the 1940’s. At the heigth of her fame in 1949 she left Hollywood and made films in Italy. She returned to the U.S. in 1956 and resumed her international career. She died on her 67th birthday in London. Her most iconic role is as Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca” opposite Humphrey Bogart.
TCM Overview:
A highly popular actress known for her fresh, radiant beauty, Ingrid Bergman was a natural for virtuous roles but equally adept at playing notorious women. Either way, she had few peers when it came to expressing the subtleties of romantic tension. In 1933, fresh out of high school, she enrolled in the Royal Dramatic Theater and made her film debut the following year, soon becoming Sweden’s most promising young actress. Her breakthrough film was Gustaf Molander’s “Intermezzo” (1936), in which she played a pianist who has a love affair with a celebrated–and married–violinist. The film garnered the attention of American producer David O. Selznick, who invited her to Hollywood to do a remake. In 1939 she co-starred with Leslie Howard in that film, which the public loved, leading to a seven-year contract with Selznick
“New York Times” obituary:
Ingrid Bergman, the three-time Academy Award-winning actress who exemplified wholesome beauty and nobility to countless moviegoers, died of cancer Sunday at her home in London on her 67th birthday.
Miss Bergman had been ill for eight years. Despite this, she played two of her most demanding roles in this period, a concert pianist in Ingmar Bergman’s ”Autumn Sonata” and Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister in ”A Woman Called Golda.” her last role.
Miss Bergman said in an interview earlier this year that she was determined not to let her illness prevent her from enjoying the remainder of her life.
”Cancer victims who don’t accept their fate, who don’t learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left,” she said. Miss Bergman added that she had to push herself to play the role of Golda Meir: ”I honestly didn’t think I had it in me. But it has been a wonderful experience, as an actress and as a human being who is getting more out of life than expected.”
Lars Schmidt, a Swedish producer from whom Miss Bergman was divorced in 1975, was with her at the time of her death. Incandescent, the critics called Ingrid Bergman. Or radiant. Or luminous. They said her performances were sincere, natural. Sometimes a single adjective was not enough. One enraptured writer saw her as ”a breeze whipping over a Scandinavian peak.” Kenneth Tynan needed an essay before he distilled her quality down to a sort of electric transmission of ”I need you” that registered instantly upon yearning audiences.
At the heart of the Swedish star’s monumental box-office magnetism was the kind of rare beauty that Hollywood cameramen call ”bulletproof angles,” meaning it can be shot from any angle.
Her beauty was so remarkable that it sometimes seemed to overshadow her considerable acting talent. The expressive blue eyes, wide, fulllipped mouth, high cheekbones, soft chin and broad forehead projected a quality that combined vulnerability and courage; sensitivity and earthiness, and an unending flow of compassion.
It all seemed so natural that not until she was well into middle age, in Ingmar Bergman’s taxing ”Autumn Sonata” in 1978, did many of her fans fully realize the talent, work and intelligence that were behind the performances that won her three Academy Awards.
She was honored as best actress for her roles in ”Gaslight” in 1944 and ”Anastasia” in 1956, and as best supporting actress in ”Murder on the Orient Express” in 1974.
In temperament, Miss Bergman was different from most Hollywood superstars. She did not indulge in tantrums or engage in harangues with directors. If she had a question about a script, she asked it without fuss. She could be counted on to be letter perfect in her lines before she faced the camera. And during the intervals between scenes, her relaxing smile and hearty laugh were as unaffected as her low-heeled shoes, long walking stride and minimal makeup.
Yet this even-tempered and successful actress, who was apparently happily married, became involved in a scandal that rocked the movie industry, forced her to stay out of the United States for seven years and made her life as tempestuous as many of her roles. In a sense, she became a barometer of changing moral values in the United States.
In 1949 she fell in love with Roberto Rossellini, the Italian film director, and had a child by him before she could obtain a divorce from her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and marry the director.
Symbol of Moral Perfection
Before the scandal, millions of Americans had been moved by her performances in such box-office successes as ”Intermezzo,” ”For Whom the Bell Tolls,” ”Gaslight,” ”Spellbound,” ”The Bells of St. Mary’s,” ”Notorious” and ”Casablanca,” roles that had made her, somewhat to her annoyance, a symbol of moral perfection.
”I cannot understand,” she said, long before the scandal, ”why people think I’m pure and full of nobleness. Every human being has shades of bad and good.”
Suddenly, in 1949, the American public that had elevated her to the point of idolatry cast her down, vilified her and boycotted her films. She was even condemned on the floor of the United States Senate.
Then, seven years after she had fallen from grace in this country, she returned to gather new acclaim and honors for her acting, and she never again suffered any noticeable loss of favor as an actress or as a person. But she spent nearly all of her remaining working life in Europe, sometimes for American movie companies.
So complete was Miss Bergman’s victory that Senator Charles H. Percy, Republican of Illinois, entered into the Congressional Record, in 1972, an apology for the attack made on her 22 years earlier in the Senate by Edwin C. Johnson, Democrat of Colorado.
By this time Miss Bergman had already expressed publicly her feelings and philosophy. Upon her return to the United States in 1956, for the first time since her departure, she told a jammed airport press conference, in English, Swedish, German, French and Italian:
”I have had a wonderful life. I have never regretted what I did. I regret things I didn’t do. All my life I’ve done things at a moment’s notice. Those are the things I remember. I was given courage, a sense of adventure and a little bit of humor. I don’t think anyone has the right to intrude in your life, but they do. I would like people to separate the actress and the woman.”
Though her marriage to Mr. Rossellini fell apart less than two years later, she won custody of their three children Robertino, Isabella and Ingrid ; she never changed her attitude. And Miss Bergman continued to defend the films she made for him, though all were financial failures and received poor reviews in this country. The Rossellini debacles created a myth that before she worked for him she had only successes. Among her pre-Rossellini failures were ”Arch of Triumph,” ”Joan of Arc” and ”Under Capricorn,” all of which came immediately before she went to work for Mr. Rossellini.
It was Miss Bergman’s lifelong desire for artistic growth that drew her to Mr. Rossellini. She had been deeply moved by his films ”Open City” and ”Paisan,” which established him as a major force in neorealism. Money had never been enough for Miss Bergman. ”You don’t act for money,” she said. ”You do it because you love it, because you must.”
Even the Oscars she had won were not enough. On Broadway, her portrayal of Joan of Arc, in Maxwell Anderson’s ”Joan of Lorraine,” won her an Antoinette Perry award, the highest honor in the American theater. Audiences and critics could adore her love scenes with Humphrey Bogart in ”Casablanca” and with Cary Grant in ”Notorious.” But praise, too, was not enough.
”There is a kind of acting in the United States,” she said many years later, ”especially in the movies, where the personality remains the same in every part. I like changing as much as possible.”
This artistic need prompted her to write to Mr. Rossellini: ”I would make any sacrifice to appear in a film under your direction.” He leaped at the opportunity, rewrote a script he had intended for Anna Magnani, and went with Miss Bergman to the Italian island of Stromboli to make the film of that name.
While this movie was being made, she asked her husband for a divorce so she could marry Mr. Rossellini. He tried to block it, even after learning she was pregnant with the director’s child.
The first of her three children with the director was born, under a media siege, in Italy, seven days before she was remarried. Dr. Lindstrom, a neurosurgeon, won custody of their daughter, Pia, who subsequently became a well-known television reporter.
By 1957, she and Mr. Rossellini were separated, but before that Miss Bergman had begun a new phase in her career. She made ”Anastasia” for 20th Century-Fox and won her second Oscar in 1956, playing the mysterious woman who might or might not be the surviving daughter of Czar Nicholas II. She then won a television Emmy award for her performance of the tormented governess in a dramatization of Henry James’s ”The Turn of the Screw.” In 1958 she married Lars Schmidt, a successful Swedish theatrical producer.
Miss Bergman refused to be drawn into arguments about acting in movies, the theater and television. She enjoyed all three. In the movies, she said, one acted for one eye, the camera. In the theater, for a thousand eyes, the theater audience. Television was ”wonderful,” she said, allowing for the frenzied schedule.
Maturity strengthened her determination to be more selective in roles. This was one of the main reasons she returned to Broadway in 1967, after a 21-year absence, in the role of a mother disliked by her son in Eugene O’Neill’s ”More Stately Mansions.”
She had met the playwright in her Hollywood years, when, during a vacation from films, she played the prostitute in his ”Anna Christie” in theaters in New Jersey and on the West Coast. During another sabbatical from Hollywood, in 1940, she had made her Broadway stage debut as Julie in ”Liliom,” opposite Burgess Meredith.
Miss Bergman’s next growth period, which included stage performances of works by George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and the role of the vengeful millionaire in the film version of ”The Visit,” was climaxed by the fulfillment of a 13-year effort to persuade Ingmar Bergman, the director, to let her work for him.
In his ”Autumn Sonata,” she gave what she considered her finest performance, as a middle-aged concert pianist who, during a brief visit to her married daughter, played by Liv Ullmann, engages in prolonged and tearful confrontations that reveal a complex and searing love-hate relationship. She was nominated for her fourth Oscar for this 1978 movie, and she said it might be her last role.
”I don’t want to go down and play little parts,” she said. ”This should be the end.” Miss Bergman always refused to play any part that required her to be nude or seminude. Although she was opposed to movie censorship, she considered nudity, particularly in love scenes, ugly, saying: ”Since the beginning of time, good theater has existed without nudity. Why change now?”
Miss Bergman was born in Stockholm on Aug. 29, 1915. Her mother, who was from Hamburg, Germany, died when Ingrid was three years old. As an only child, she learned to create imaginary friends. Her father, who had a camera shop, adored her and photographed her constantly, often in costume. He died when she was 13. She lived briefly with an unmarried aunt and then with an uncle and aunt who had five children.
At 17, although she was tall and somewhat ungainly – she was 5 feet 9 inches and weighed about 135 pounds – she auditioned successfully for the government-sponsored Royal Dramatic School.
Within seven years she was one of the leading movie stars in Sweden and had refused several offers from Hollywood. Finally, in 1939, at the age of 24, Miss Bergman agreed to do a film for David O. Selznick. It was ”Intermezzo,” with Leslie Howard. She returned to Sweden to her husband, who was then a dentist, and their daughter, Pia.
The film was so successful that Mr. Selznick, convinced he had found ”another Garbo,” persuaded her to return to Hollywood. Looking back on her career many years later, particularly on her feeling of youthful shyness and awkwardness, the actress said: ”I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn’t choose acting. It chose me.” Miss Bergman is survived by her four children, who were reported to be flying to London yesterday for the funeral. The funeral will be ”a very quiet, family affair,” said Alfred Jackman, funeral director at Harrods, the London department store that is handling the arrangements. Mr. Jackman added, ”After cremation, her ashes may be taken back to Sweden.”
The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness, poster, US poster art, top from left: Ingrid Bergman, Curt Jurgens, Robert Donat, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Almost two decades before Brigitte Bardot, the epithet “sex kitten” could have been applied even more appropriately to Simone Simon, who has died aged 94.
Jean Renoir described the character Simon played in La Bête Humaine (1938) thus: “Severine is not a vamp. She’s a cat, a real cat, with a silky coat that begs to be caressed, a short little snout, a big, slightly beseeching mouth and eyes full of promises.” To add to the analogy, Simon is first seen in the film at a window, gently stroking a white kitten.
But her most famous role was in Cat People (1942) as Irene, a Serbian-born fashion artist living in New York, who is haunted by the fear that she is descended from a race of cat-women who turn into panthers when sexually aroused. “Kiss me or claw me!” read the ads.
Simone Simon, the daughter of a French engineer and an Italian mother, was born in Béthune and brought up in Marseilles. At 19, she went to Paris, where she worked briefly as a fashion designer, a model and cabaret singer, before making her screen debut as a singer in Le Chanteur Inconnu (1931). It was her fourth film, Lac Aux Dames (1934), directed by Marc Allégret, that made her a star. In the Colette screenplay, Simon is a mysterious child of nature called Puck, who entrances Jean-Pierre Aumont, the swimming instructor at a mountain lake resort.
It led to a contract with 20th Century Fox, who exploited her child-woman sensuality. In her Hollywood debut, Girls’ Dormitory (1936) she played a student at an Alpine finishing school who falls for Herbert Marshall, the headmaster, even though he is old enough to be her father. At the end of this Lolita-esque tale, Simon (actually 25) steps aside for an older woman.
In the redundant remake of the Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell silent melodrama Seventh Heaven, Simon is a woman with a shady reputation, whom Parisian sewer-worker James Stewart has given shelter in his slum apartment. “Diane, don’t ever leave me, or like a candle, I’ll go out,” he says. This was followed by Love And Hisses (1937), in which she actually sang the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé in what the New York Times described as “a thin, inexpressive little voice”. She then took the title role in a bit of fluff called Josette (1938), being fought over by Don Ameche and Robert Young.
No wonder she found herself in conflict with Fox, both over the material and her salary, and she arrived back in France on August 8 1938, 10 days before shooting began there on La Bête Humaine. For the role of Severine, who persuades her lover Lantier (Jean Gabin) to murder her husband, the producers originally suggested Gina Manès, then pushing 43, who had played various femme fatale roles. Renoir refused vehemently: “I claimed, and still claim, that vamps have to be played by women with innocent faces. Women with innocent faces are the most dangerous ones! Also, you don’t expect it, so there is an element of surprise! I insisted we use Simone Simon, which we did, and I don’t think we were sorry.” (Curiously, Manès was seriously injured by a tiger in a circus in 1942, when Simon was filming Cat People.)
Following the glowing reviews Simon received for her performance – a teasing mixture of innocence, perversity and sensuality – she asked for 800,000 francs on Renoir’s next film, La Règle Du Jeu, almost one third of the projected budget, much more than the producers were willing to pay. She was offered a better deal by RKO in Hollywood, returning to play, literally, a vixen from hell in the Faustian All That Money Can Buy (1942). Then came Cat People, in which she portrayed, with sensitivity and restraint, a tortured creature, as terrifying to herself as others.
Although RKO advertised The Curse Of The Cat People (1944) with the legend “The Beast Woman Haunts The Night Anew!”, it was not strictly speaking a horror film. In it, Simon again played Irene, now seemingly back from the dead to become an adviser and friend to the lonely six-year-old daughter of her ex-husband. Only seen by the little girl, she drifts through the film in an ethereal manner.
Simon’s last American film was Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), a hymn to French resistance, though set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Based on Maupassant’s Boule De Suif, the title role was in fact, the nickname given to a sadistic Prussian officer occupying a small French village, and Simon is the laundress with whom he meets retribution.
The war over, Simon returned to Europe, playing a mercenary showgirl in the British-made Temptation Harbour (1947), and the chambermaid in Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950), who, after being seduced by a soldier, seduces a student.
Jacqueline Audrey’s Olivia (1951) was full of hothouse emotions and lesbian undertones with Simon and Edwige Feuillère as sisters who run a girls’ boarding school, dividing the establishment into two factions.
For Ophuls again, she appeared in another Maupassant tale, Le Plaisir (1952), as the model and mistress of an artist whom she forces to marry her out of sympathy when she cripples herself attempting suicide. Simon retired after The Extra Day (1956), a British picture in which she played a French film star.
A few years ago, during the making of the Omnibus TV documentary on Jean Renoir, Simone Simon was asked for an interview. She refused, saying that she did not want to appear on camera as she was “a very old woman”. Perhaps it was a wise decision, as she has left us with a vision of a lovely, young woman.
· Simone Simon, actor, born April 23 1910; died February 22 2005.
Her Guardian obituary can also be accessed on line here.
