By
Ed Garea
Louis
Jourdan, the handsome, doe-eyed actor best known for his role
in Gigi, and who to many seemed to be the epitome of
everything French, died on February 14 at his home in Los Angeles,
according to his official biographer, Olivier Minne.
For
audiences from the ‘40s through the ‘60s, Jourdan’s good looks
and sexy French purr made him the most popular French export since
Charles Boyer. He specialized in playing the smooth Continental type,
whether in musicals, dramas, or comedies. He became so identified
with this role and such as his popularity that he was later spoofed
by Christopher Walken as "The Continental" in a series of
sketches on Saturday Night Live.
He
was born Louis Henri Gendre in Marseilles on June 19, 1921, one of
three sons of hotelier Henri Gendre, who organized the Cannes
Film Festival after the second world war, and Yvonne, whose maiden
name of Jourdan Louis took as his stage name. Henri’s work
necessitated frequent travel, and the family followed him. Thus Louis
was educated in France, Turkey and Britain, where he learned to speak
perfect English, while being savvy enough to keep his slight soft
French accent.
Jourdan
knew from an early age that he wanted to be an actor and studied
under Rene Simon at the Ecole Dramatique in Paris. While studying, he
began to appear on the professional stage, where he caught the
attention of director Marc Allégret, who hired him as an
assistant camera operator on his 1938 film, Entrée des
Artistes (The Curtain Rises). A year later,
Allégre cast him in his film debut, Le
Corsaire (1939), starring Charles Boyer. But the
outbreak of World War II interrupted the production, and the movie
was never completed.
Jourdan
continued to make films, before and after the German Occupation. But
when he was ordered to make German propaganda films, he refused and
fled to the Unoccupied Zone, where he continued to work in film.
However, when the Gestapo arrested his father, Louis and his brothers
went underground and joined the French Resistance. Louis helped print
and distribute Resistance leaflets during this time.
With
the Liberation in 1944, Jourdan found film and stage work easier to
come by, the main reason being that, as he was in the Resistance, he
was not tainted by having worked for Marshal Petain and entertained
the Germans, as had many of his contemporaries.
In
1946, Jourdan married childhood sweetheart Berthe Frédérique (known
as Quique) and went to Los Angeles after producer David O. Selznick
promised he could make more of himself in Hollywood than he ever
could in Paris. Selznick cast him as the slightly sinister valet
suspected of murdering his employer in The Paradine
Case (1947), starring Gregory Peck. This was done over the
objections of director Alfred Hitchcock, who conceived of the
character as a rough, earthy type. Hitchcock referred to Jourdan as
“a pretty-pretty boy,” complaining that his casting “destroyed
the whole point of the film.” But Jourdan’s relationship with
Hitchcock was far better than his relationship with Selznick, who
put him on suspension many times for refusing roles.
Jourdan
followed up with a starring role in his next film, Max Ophüls’s
masterly Letter From an Unknown Woman in 1948. Based
on the story by Stefan Zweig, he played the debonair, womanizing
pianist who seduces and abandons Joan Fontaine. The role allowed him
to make the most of his smooth charm, and to play a complex
character: an empty man who comes to realize in the end how much this
emptiness has cost him.
In
1949, he starred in director Vincente Minnelli’s glossy version of
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, as Rodolphe Boulanger, the
lover of adulterous Emma Bovary, played by Jennifer Jones. 1952 saw
him co-starring with Boyer in director Richard Fleischer’s The
Happy Time, about a French family in Ottawa during the 1920s.
Jourdan
returned to France in 1953 for Rue de l’Estrapade, and La
mariee est trop belle (The Bride is Too Beautiful),
with Brigitte Bardot, which wasn’t released until 1956 with the
title Her Bridal Night. While in Italy in 1954 he
appeared in Three Coins in the Fountain, playing the
dashing Prince Dino di Cessi.
When
not making movies, Jourdan kept busy in television, playing a police
inspector in the ABC series Paris Precinct (1955).
He guested on such prestigious programs as Studio One, The
Elgin Hour, and Celebrity Playhouse. He also made his
debut on the Broadway stage in 1954, starring in an adaptation of
Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, playing a repressed gay man
embarking on marriage. Although his reviews were generally
excellent, he found himself upstaged by the performance of a striking
young supporting actor: James Dean. He returned to the New York stage
the next year in Tonight in Samarkand, letting Hollywood know
that he was not getting more of the serious film roles he wanted.
In
1958 came the role of a lifetime, playing Gaston Lachaille in
director Minnelli’s Gigi.
The film, which co-starred Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Caron, won
nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and made Jourdan an
international celebrity, as he sang the title song. But Jourdan did
not receive a nomination (for this or any other movie in his
career). Gigi did
earn him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.
In
the ‘60s, the suave, Continental types that Jourdan specialized in
began to fall out of favor with American moviegoers. He played the
suave Philipe Forrestier in Can-Can (1960), starring
Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, and Chevalier. He also played
Continental types in 1963’s The VIPs and the 1966 Made
in Paris, as a fashion designer, before the bottom finally fell
out.
With
each passing year, Jourdan found himself cast more as the suave,
charming villain than the suave, charming hero. He also made more of
a living on television than in the movies, finding himself in demand
as a guest star. In 1977, he gave a memorable and seductive
performance in the title role of Count Dracula, a movie
directed by Phillip Saville for the BBC. It was the closest version
of the venerable vampire tale to Bram Stoker’s novel. In 1983, he
appeared as the villainous Kamal Khan in the James Bond
opus Octopussy. He also played the evil and oily Dr.
Anton Arcane in Wes Craven’s 1982 Swamp Thing and
its 1989 sequel, The Return of Swamp Thing.
In
the mid-80s, he would return to Gigi, this time in a touring
show and in Chevalier’s role. To the frequent criticism that he
lip-synched his songs, he answered: “If I sang them live, the
fragile little voice I have would go.”
His
final film appearance came as a suave villain in director Peter
Yates’s Year of the Comet (1992), an excellent caper about a
rare bottle of wine. In 2010, he was named as a chevalier, or knight,
of the Légion d’Honneur.
Jourdan
was well liked in Hollywood, but noted for keeping his private life
private. In 2014, he lost wife Berthe Frederique after 68 years of
marriage. Son Louis Henry died in 1981 from a drug overdose at
29. Pierre Jourdan, a brother who was an actor and a theater director
in France, died in 2007.
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