European Actors Archives

France Nuyen

France Nuyen (born France Nguyễn Vân Nga on 31 July 1939) is a French-American actress, model, and psychological counselor. She is known to film audiences for playing romantic leads in South Pacific (1958), Satan Never Sleeps (1962), and A Girl Named Tamiko (also 1962), and for playing Ying-Ying St. Clair in The Joy Luck Club (1993). She also originated the title role in the Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong, based on the novel of the same name. She is a Theatre World Award winner and Golden Globe Award nominee.

France Nuyen was born in Marseille. Her mother was French and during World War II, her mother and grandfather were persecuted by the Nazis for being Roma.

Nuyen was raised in Marseille by a cousin she calls “an Orchidaceae raiser who was the only person who gave a damn about me.” Having left school at the age of 11, she began studying art and became an artist’s model

In 1955, while working as a seamstress, Nuyen was discovered on the beach by Lifephotographer Philippe Halsman. She was featured on the cover of 6 October 1958 issue of Life

France Nuyen became a motion picture actress in 1958. In her first role, she appeared as Liat, daughter of Bloody Mary (played by Juanita Hall) in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.

In 1978 France Nuyen guest-starred with Peter Falk and Louis Jourdan in the Columbo episode “Murder Under Glass“. In 1986 she joined the cast of St. Elsewhere as Dr. Paulette Kiem, remaining until the series ended in 1988.

Ms Nuyen appeared in several films including The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961) Satan Never Sleeps (1962), A Girl Named Tamiko(1962), Diamond Head (1963), Dimension 5 (1966), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), The Joy Luck Club (1993) and The American Standards (2008).

France Nuyen worked several times with actor William Shatner. At age 19, she was cast in Shatner’s 1958 Broadway play The World of Suzie Wong. The play ran for more than 500 performances and was quite financially successful. Both Nuyen and Shatner later collected notable accolades for their work on the show, at the 1959 Theatre World Awards.

Ms Nuyen worked again with Shatner across three US television projects, starting with “Elaan of Troyius“, a 1968 third season episode of the original Star Trek in which Nuyen was the title character. She would later appear with Shatner in the 1973 made for TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet, and afterward in a 1974 episode of the Kung Fu.

France Nuyen was married to Thomas Gaspar Morell, a psychiatrist from New York, by whom she has a daughter, Fleur, who resides in Canada and works as a film make-up artist. She met her second husband, Robert Culp, while appearing in four episodes of his television series I Spy. They married in 1967, but divorced three years later. In 1986, Nuyen earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and began a second career as a counselor for abused women, children and women in prison. She received a Woman of the Year award in 1989 for her psychology work. In the Life cover story on Nuyen, she is quoted as saying a proverb she also repeated in character as a spy in the I Spy episode “Magic Mirror”: “I am Chinese. I am a stone. I go where I am kicked.”

She resides in California.

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TAINA ELG (WIKIPEDIA)

Taina Elg is one of the few actresses who hail from Finland to star in Hollywood films. She was born in Helsinki in 1930. She trained originally as a ballet dancer. She joined the Sadler Welles Ballet company in London. She was noticed by an American film producer and offered a Hollywood contract. Her first U.S. film was “The Prodigal” with Edmund Purdom and Lana Turner in 1955. She made a number of other films for MGM including “Gaby” and “Diane”. She went on to star with Kay Kendall, Gene Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor in “Les Girls” amusical with songs by Cole Porter. She then went to Britain to film the remake of “The 39 Steps” with Kenneth More. Her film career waned somewhat during the early 1960’s and she acted more frequently on stage and on television. Her son is the famous jazz guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim. Interview with Taina Elg on “Finland Center” website here.

Gary Brumburgh’s entry:

One of her country’s most celebrated performers, Finnish actress and dancer Taina Elg was born in 1931 in Impilahti, in Southeastern Finland (located near the Finnish/Russian border). Her home later became a target during the Finnish-Soviet wars between 1939 and 1944 and when it became part of the Soviet Union, the family was forced to leave.

At a very young age, she began her training in ballet and acting. When the family moved to Helsinki, Taina continued with her dance and acting training and eventually was invited to join the Finnish National Ballet. She appeared in a few homeland movies as early as age 10 and found a couple of obscure film roles as a teenager, one in which she danced.

Taina’s international reputation began to grow when she joined the famed Sadler’s Wells ballet dance company (The Royal Ballet) in London and then the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, in Paris. A serious injury forced her to rethink her dancing career. Fortunately, she was discovered in London by American film producer Edwin H. Knopf and, on the heels of the spectacular Hollywood success fellow Scandinavian Anita Ekberg was having, MGM decided to sign Taina for a seven-year Hollywood contract.

She made her American debut for MGM with the secondary role of Elissa in the Lana Turner biblical costumer The Prodigal (1955). The following year MGM utilized her acting talents in their films Diane (1956), again starring Ms. Turner, and Gaby (1956) withLeslie Caron. For the afore-mentioned work she was honored with a Golden Globe award for female “foreign newcomer”.

Taina was subsequently handed her best all-around opportunity by MGM to display her sublime dancing, sexy figure and comedic acting skills when asked to portray Angèle Ducros in Cole Porter‘s musical Les Girls (1957) opposite Gene Kelly and alongside fellow dazzlers Mitzi Gaynor and Kay Kendall. Receiving her second consecutive Golden Globe (tying with Kendall) for “Best Actress” in a musical, Les Girls (1957) also won the Golden Globe for “Best Picture – Musical” and an Oscar for its costume design.

More films came her way with Imitation General (1958) starring Glenn Ford and Red Buttons; the remake of the classic The 39 Steps (1959) opposite Kenneth More; the African adventure Watusi (1959) with George Montgomery and David Farrar and the war story Mission of Danger (1960), which was actually culled from a few TV episodes. None, however, could match the quality of Les Girls (1957

Ms. Elg’s Hollywood film career went into a steep decline at this juncture and she began focusing on TV projects, foreign films and especially theatre roles. Appearing on stage in such 1960s productions as “Redhead,” “Silk Stockings,” “Irma La Douce,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music” and “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” she finally made her Broadway debut with the musical “Look to the Lilies” in 1970, which was based on the Oscar-winning film Lilies of the Field (1963).

She never found a strong footing again in films and has appeared in less than a handful since. Other than the 1961 Italian spectacle Bondage Gladiator Sexy (1961), she showed up in the musclebound Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s vehicle Hercules in New York (1969),Liebestraum (1991), and the Barbra Streisand feature The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

Her love for the stage was obvious and she remained as colorful than ever gracing such musicals as Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” (1973) in which she sang the haunting “Send in the Clowns.” She also returned to Broadway in later years with the musicals “Where’s Charley?”, for which she earned a Tony nomination, “Nine” and “Cabaret”. She appeared in the national tour of the musical “Titanic” in 1998-1999. On the non-musical stage she had strong roles in “Uncle Vanya,” “I Hate Hamlet” “O Pioneers!” and, more recently, “Requiem for William” and Memory of a Summer” (both 2003).

In 2004, the actress received a special honor from her native Finland, when she was knight by the Order of the Lion of Finland. She is a naturalized American citizen.

The jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is Taina’s son from her first marriage (1953-1958) to Carl “Poku” Björkenheim. In 1985 she was married to Rocco Caporale, an Italian educator and professor of sociology. The couple lived in New York City until his death in 2008.

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

EYE FOR FILM OBITUARY IN 2022:

One of the last surviving French sex symbols from the Fifties and Sixties Mylène Demongeot has died at the age of 87 after a long illness.

Demongeot who spent her youth in Montpellier and adored the region around the town, latterly had devoted herself to animal rights in common with her contemporary Brigitte Bardot. Bardot wrote in one of her books that “Mylène was my little cinema sister, then became my combat sister, a libra like me, she has always loved animals”.

After the death of her long-standing companion Didier Raoult, the actress had her own battles with cancer and recently coronavirus against which she had declined to be vaccinated, claiming to have multiple allergies.

Despite more than her fair share of adversity she kept working and recently appeared in such popular box office hits as Retirement Home (Maison de Retraite) by Thomas Gilou, playing opposite Gérard Depardieu; Camping 3 by Fabien Onteniente with Claude Brasseur, and The Midwife (Sage Femme by Martin Provost) with Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve.

The daughter of a French father and Ukrainian mother the actress made an early impression in Raymond Rouleau’s production of The Witches Of Salem alongside Simone Signoret and Yves Montand.

She was taken up and promoted by photographer Henri Coste with whom she learned to pose for the camera and who later became her first husband.

Demongeot was born in Nice in 1935 and appeared in more than 72 films in a career which spanned six decades. She was nominated for a Bafta award as most promising newcomer in 1957 for a Franco-German production of The Crucible, and was praised by the play’s author Arthur Miller as “bursting with real sexuality”.

She performed in such costume adventures as The Vengeance Of The Three Musketeers (1961) as Milady de Winter and in comedies, among them Fantômas (1964), directed by André Hunebelle, and its various sequels.

On the international arena notably she co-starred with David Niven in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse from the novel by Françoise Sagan (1958). In the UK she co-starred in several comedies, including It’s A Wonderful World (1956); Upstairs and Downstairs (1959) and Doctor in Distress (1963).

Demongeot was also nominated for César Awards for Best Supporting Actress in 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004) and La Californie . Her husband was Marc Simenon, the son of Maigret creator Georges Simenon..

In her later years she was conned out of her life-savings of some two million euros after a financial scare and only had survived by making drastic economies and living in a small flat in Paris. The anti-corruption squad eventually caught the culprit.

George Mikell was born on April 15, 1930 in Tawroggen, Lithuania. He is an actor, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Great Escape (1963) and Dateline Diamonds(1965).

Sarah Biasini was born on July 21, 1977 in Gassin, Var, France as Sarah Magdalena Biasini. She is an actress, known for Blind Test (2010), Recon: A Filmmaker’s Quest(2012) and Suite noire (2009). She is the daughter of actors Daniel Biasini and Romy Schneider.

Leon Vitali (Wikipedia)

Leon Vitali was born. in 1948 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England and went on to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Vitali guest-starred in a number of TV series in the early 1970s, appearing in Softly, Softly, Follyfoot, Roads to Freedom, Z Cars, Public Eye, The Fenn Street Gang, series 1 and Notorious Woman, among others. In 1973, he made his feature film debut in two movies: the Italian Super Bitch, directed by Massimo Dallamano, who had previously worked with Sergio Leoneas a cinematographer in the first two of his Dollars Trilogy, and the television film Catholics, alongside Martin Sheen and Michael Gambon.

It wasn’t until 1974 that Vitali met Stanley Kubrick, with whom he would go on to have a professional relationship for the rest of Kubrick’s career. Vitali answered a casting call for Barry Lyndon and got the part of Lord Bullingdon, the title character’s stepson. Kubrick and Vitali bonded during the shoot. As filming concluded, Vitali asked Kubrick if he could stay on, without pay, to observe the editing process, to which Kubrick agreed^[3]. Five years later, Kubrick sent Vitali a copy of Stephen King‘s The Shining and asked him to join the production of Kubrick’s next film, to which Vitali eagerly agreed. He is credited in The Shining (1980) as “personal assistant to director”.

In 1977 he portrayed Victor Frankenstein in Terror of Frankenstein, Calvin Floyd’s adaptation of Mary Shelley‘s classic Frankenstein, where he met his future wife Kersti Vitali, who worked as costume designer in the shoot. The Vitalis then worked as costume designers in Birgitta Svensson‘s Mackan, after which Leon played a bit part in Svensson’s next film, Inter Rail (1981). Leon and Kersti would divorce later on. Swedish actress Vera Vitali is their daughter. Masha Vitali is a second daughter. Max Vitali is their son.

Vitali teamed with Kubrick again for Full Metal Jacket (1987), where he served both as casting director and assistant to the director. Twelve years later, Vitali was credited with the same titles in working with Kubrick in what would be the director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in which Vitali also played the Red Cloak. The words “fashion designer Leon Vitali” also appear in the third column of the newspaper article that Tom Cruise’s character reads to learn about a former beauty queen’s hotel drugs overdose.

Since Kubrick’s death Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick’s films. In 2004, Vitali was honored with the Cinema Audio Society‘s President’s Award for this work.

In 2017, Vitali was the subject of a documentary, Filmworker, directed by Tony Zierra and screened at the London Film Festival in October 2017, in which he is interviewed at length about his work with Kubrick.^[4] The film was broadcast by Film4 in the UK on 7 March 2019, followed by a showing of Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

In 1999, Vitali and filmmaker Todd Field, with whom he appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, began discussing the possibility of making films together. Vitali is credited as “technical consultant” on Field’s In the Bedroom (2001), and as “associate producer” on Field’s Little Children (2006), where he also made a cameo appearance as “The Oddly Familiar Man”.

He played the apothecary in Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet (2013).

Leon Vitali died in August 2022 aged 74.

Pablito Calvo (real name Pablo Calvo Hidalgo) (16 March 1948 – 1 February 2000) was a Spanish child actor. After the international success of Marcelino, pan y vino, where he won a Cannes Film Festival award (1955), he became Spain’s most famous child actor. He did five more films, even in Italy, with Totò.

Retired from acting at the age of 16 to become an industrial engineer later, he worked in tourism and promoting buildings in Torrevieja.
.In 1976 he married Juana Olmedo, with whom in 1979 he had a son, Pablito Jr. He died aged 52 of an aneurysm.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary from 2000:

There must have been worse ways of earning a living than passionately making love to the 22-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the beach of St Tropez. Christian Marquand, who has died aged 73, was a lucky man.The film was And God Created Woman (1956), and the steamy scene was directed watchfully by Bardot’s husband, Roger Vadim. Mostly shot on location, the rather silly, but certainly sensual, tale was a good excuse for him to display his wife’s amoral charms in various forms of dress, which mainly comprised jeans, and undress.

But the film also gave Marquand’s career a boost. Vadim’s debut movie tells of how Bardot, shortly after her marriage to a wimpish Jean-Louis Trintignant, finds she is more attractive to her dour but handsome brother-in-law, Marquand. Coincidentally in real life, Trintignant was to marry Marquand’s sister, Nadine, a few years later. But back on the beach, Bardot teases Marquand into ripping off her clothes and taking her.

The film created a scandal in France. This was mainly because of the discreet nudity of the beach scene, but Vadim complained that the censors forced him to cut the sequence.

Marquand himself was no stranger to scandal. The previous year he had a role in Marc Allègret’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which had starred Danielle Darrieux as the erring English aristocrat. In his private life, he married Tina, the daughter of Jean-Pierre Aumont and Maria Montez, in 1963, then had a son by the actress Dominique Sanda in the early 1970s. Thus he seemed to reflect his adulterous film persona.

One of his best pictures was Alexandre Astruc’s Une Vie (1958), based on a Guy de Maupassant story. In it, Marquand was the womanising husband of a young, innocent aristocrat, played by a cloying Maria Schell.

His affair with a friend’s wife (beautiful Antonella Lualdi) leads to his death. The main strength of the film, apart from Claude Renoir’s wonderful impressionistic Technicolor photography, was the way in which Marquand managed to find many nuances in the unsympathetic character he played.

Marquand was born in Marseilles, the son of a Spanish father and an Arab mother; the fact that he spoke Spanish, Arabic, French, English and Italian – all learned as a child – aided his international career. At the age of 21, his dark good looks got him a bit part in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast (1946), and he was soon getting slightly bigger roles, such as the Bohemian officer friend of the caddish soldier hero (Farley Granger) in Luchino Visconti’s lush melodrama, Senso (1954).

In the 1960s, he moved with ease between films made in France and those coming out of Hollywood. Among the uninspiring latter were the D-Day epic, The Longest Day (1962), in which Marquand enlisted as part of the French contingent; Fred Zinnemann’s post-Spanish civil war film, Behold A Pale Horse (1964), in which he played a Spaniard; and, as the French doctor among the aircrash survivors, in Robert Aldrich’s The Flight Of The Phoenix (1966).

Marquand was better served by Claude Chabrol in The Road To Corinth (1967), in which he portrayed an American Nato security officer investigating mysterious boxes jamming US radar installations in Greece. In 1962, he made Of Flesh and Blood, a competent thriller featuring Anouk Aimée, and the first of two films he directed.

Marquand’s succès de scandale was Candy (1968), about the conquests of a nymphet, played by Ewa Aulin, and adapted by Buck Henry and Terry Southern from the latter’s novel. In the movie, a large international cast, including Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, John Huston, Walter Mathau, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour, Elsa Martinelli, Ringo Starr, and even the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, did a series of star turns.

The result, according to the Monthly Film Bulletin, was that “hippy psychedelics are laid on with the self-destroying effect of an overdose of garlic”. Disappointed by this mainly negative reception, amidst the era of the love generation, Marquand returned to acting.

Tragically, in the early 1980s, however, he was struck by Alzeimer’s disease and retired from the world. He spent many of his last years in hospital, not knowing anybody who visited him. His sister, the director Nadine Trintignant, wrote a moving book about his plight, Ton Chapeau au Vestiaire (His Hat in The Cloakroom).

She survives him, as do his actor brother Serge Marquand, his former wife Tina Aumont, and his son.

Christian Marquand, actor; born March 15 1927; died November 22 2000

Wikipedia entry:

He was born in Rome, the son of actor Cesare Fantoni (1905–1963). In films from the late 1940s, he has worked mainly in his own country but made several appearances in American films in the 1960s, most notably opposite Frank Sinatra in the war film Von Ryan’s Express, made in 1965. In 1960 he played the villainous Haman in Esther and the King, starring Joan Collins and Richard Egan in the title roles. Among his TV roles, he appeared alongside Anglo-Italian actress Cherie Lunghi in the Channel 4 series The Manageress.

Obituary:

Sergio Fantoni – actor, dubbing actor, and director – would have turned 90 in August. He worked with the greatest directors, from Luchino Visconti to Blake Edwards, played in Hollywood, and got his fame from popular TV shows in the 1970s and 1980s like Anna Karenina, The Octopus and La coscienza di Zeno. His latest role was in TV series Il commissario Montalbano, in the episode “The Violin’s Voice.”

Born in Rome on 7 August 1930 from a family of artists, Fantoni first thought to become an engineer or an architect, but his passion for theatre was stronger. He started with some experimental theatre companies and in the 1970s, together with Luca Ronconi and his wife Valentina Fortunato, he founded one of the first independent theatre companies. On the big screen, he worked with directors such as Luchino Visconti (Senso), Francesco Maselli (The Dolphins with Claudia Cardinale), Giuliano Montaldo (Tiro al piccione and Sacco and Vanzetti).

He worked in Hollywood in the early 1960s in film such as Mark Robson’s The Prize, Von Ryan’s Express with Frank Sinatra, and Blake Edward’s What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? He also played in Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect.

His full-frontal nudity in Delitto di Stato, aired on Rai 2 in 1982, caused a scandal.

As a dubbing actor, he was the voice of American stars such as Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now), Henry Fonda, Rock Hudson, and Ben Kingsley.

After an operation to the larynx in 1997, he dedicated himself to theatre direction. With playwright and director Ivo Chiesa and colleague Bianca Toccafondi in 2022 he won the Lifetime Achievement Award entitled to Ennio Flaiano