Born 100 years ago today, French movie actress Madeleine LeBeau (1923-2016).
Most Americans know LeBeau perhaps without knowing her name. Her most famous Hollywood performance was in Casablanca (1942), she plays the singer Yvonne, so movingly shown in close-up during the "La Marseillaise" scene, a scene many of us thought of and referred to again and again during the early days of the Trump administration. There is a quality of defiant patriotism in the moment, a resistance against imposed injustice. And LeBeau seems to embody the spirit of her conquered nation.
The tears in LeBeau's eyes during the scene are real -- she had come west in advance of the Nazi invasion of Paris. At the time, the gorgeous LeBeau was married to Jewish actor Marcel Dalio, star of the Jean Renoir films La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939). Dalio was also in Casablanca, although in a smaller role. During her exile, LeBeau was also in the Hollywood films Hold Back the Dawn (1941), Gentleman Jim (1942), Paris After Dark (1943) and Music for Millions (1944).
LeBeau and Dalio divorced in 1942. Dalio remained in the U.S., where he enjoyed a lengthy career as a character actor. LeBeau returned to the Continent where she appeared in over two dozen more films, the best known of which include La Parisienne (1957) with Brigitte Bardot and Charles Boyer, and Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963). Was Robert Clary's character name in Hogan's Heroes (1965) an homage to her? If so, it was a nice gesture.
In 1988, at the age of 65, LeBeau married Italian screenwriter Tullio Pinelli, a frequent collaborator of Fellini's. When she died in 2016, she was the last surviving cast member of Casablanca.
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