Louis Jourdan

Born in Marseille in 1921, Louis Robert Gendre was the son of a hotel manager, who sent him to study outside his native France in countries like the United Kingdom and Turkey. When he was drawn to acting, he enrolled at the École Dramatique in Paris. As Louis Jourdan (using his mother’s maiden name, which seemed more resonant to him) he was preparing to make his film debut in Le corsaire , by Marc Allégret, but the outbreak of World War II left the project unfinished .

Like his brother, the also actor Pierre Jourdan, who would later dedicate himself more to the theater, during the years of the conflict he shot several films in Vichy France, where his father managed to escape after being arrested by the Gestapo, and the family fully involved himself in Resistance activities. La vie de bohème , by Marcel L’Herbier , stands out .

At the end of the war, Louis Jourdan dazzled a talent scout for American producer David O. Selznick , for which he was offered a contract in Hollywood. There he would debut at the hands of another European emigrant, the illustrious Alfred Hitchcock , in The Paradine Trial , where he played a servant who becomes a murder suspect. He hit it off with the Brit, to the point that he was one of the friends he spoke to at his funeral in 1980.

He then shot one of his best works, Letter from an Unknown Woman , by Max Ophüls , where he embroiders a pianist who, despite the dedication of a woman unconditionally in love with him (an extraordinary Joan Fontaine ), abandons her without even knowing that he has got pregnant. In Vincente Minnelli ‘s version of Madame Bovary , from 1949, he played the aristocrat Rodolphe Boulanger, who tries to seduce the protagonist at the moment when she tries to redo her marriage.

In the 1950s, Louis Jourdan established himself as a star, with hugely successful titles such as The Pirate Woman , Three Love Stories , We Believe in Love , The Evil Mr. Benton, Little BB (with Brigitte Bardot) , The Swan , Women Front to love, Can-can . He obtained special repercussion again under Minnelli’s orders with Gigi , a musical that he swept in 1958, along with Leslie Caron and his compatriot, veteran Maurice Chevalier .

“I never watch my movies,” the actor confessed. “It seems to me that they pigeonholed me as the prototype of French, so when they show them on TV, I change the channel.” In addition to serving as the narrator in Sweet Irma , he had time to succeed on the Broadway stage, with titles such as “The Immoralist”, where critics raved about his co-star, the promising young James Dean .

Because of his love of croquet, Louis Jourdan was associated with many producers, especially with the passionate of this sport Darryl F. Zanuck. Among his closest acquaintances was also none other than Albert R. Broccoli, creator of the James Bond saga. He convinced him to change his usual roles, almost all of them good-natured hunks, playing a James Bond villain in Octopussy . There was Kamal Khan, an Afghan prince exiled in India, considered by fans to be one of the great enemies of the agent with a license to kill. He was also the antagonist in The Year of the Comet , by Peter Yates , which was his last film work.

His close friends say that Louis Jourdan had been devastated, after the death in 2014 of Berthe Frederique Takar, his wife since 1946. “When one is married for decades, I will not deny that difficulties arise. But the important thing is that we have overcome them all “, declared the actor, who did not give big scandals in the press. Both suffered the misfortune of the death of their only son, Louis Henry, from a drug overdose in 1981. He had also been affected by the death of his brother, Pierre, in 2007.