Famous Biographies

France

Born: Figeac, France, 28 August 1997.
Died: Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 1978.

Boyer, along with Maurice Chevalier, was one of the only French stars to make a really successful career in Hollywood. A cultured and classically trained actor, Boyer possessed distinguished looks, dark eyes and a famous velvety voice. He emerged in the 1920s, but fame came with sound. He appeared in proletarian roles in Franco-German productions such as Tumultes (1931) and Fritz Lang’s French film Liliom (1934). However, his real register was that of the lover in romantic (often costume) melodrama; notably with Danielle Darrieux in Mayerling (1936) and Michèle Morgan in Orage (1937), embodying a man consumed by love, the object of desire of the heroine and of the camera. This is also his Hollywood image, in melodramas such as All This and Heaven Too (1940) with Bette Davis and Back Street (1941) with Margaret Sullavan. He also conveyed the sinister aspect of male seduction, especially in Gaslight (1944, with Ingrid Bergman). Boyer took American citizenship in 1942 and was active in promoting Franco-American relations. The antithesis of Chevalier’s caricatural Frenchman, Boyer nevertheless owed much of his success in Hollywood to a romantic notion of “Frenchness.” He kept up French connections, acting in films directed by exiles such as Julien Duvivier (Tales of Manhattan, 1942) and remakes of French films (Algiers, 1938, after Pépé le Moko; The Thirteenth Letter, 1951, after Le Corbeau). He continued his international career after the war, with notable parts in Max Ophüls’ Madame de… (1953), Christian-Jaque’s Nana (1954) and Alain Resnais’ Stavisky (1974). He killed himself two days after the death of his wife of forty-four years, the British actress Pat Paterson, perhaps his most romantic gesture.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Liliom (France 1934)
Mayering (France 1936)
Conquest (US 1937)
Algiers (US 1938)
Love Affair (US 1939)
Hold Back the Dawn (US 1941)
Gaslight (US 1944)
Madame de… / The Earrings of Madame De (France 1953)
Stavisky (France/Italy 1974)

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