Danielle Darrieux

Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux was a French actress, singer, and dancer born on 1 May 1917 in Bordeaux, France, the city where she would later be represented in Broadway database records as her place of origin. The daughter of Marie-Louise Witkowski and Jean Darrieux, a military physician serving in the French Army during World War I, she lost her father when she was seven years old. Her mother had been born in Algeria. Darrieux was raised in Paris, where she studied cello at the Conservatoire de Musique.

Her screen career began at age fourteen when she won a role in the musical film Le Bal in 1931, and she went on to appear in more than 110 films over the course of eight decades. The 1936 film Mayerling brought her significant international attention, and her combination of beauty, singing ability, and dancing skill sustained a steady stream of professional offers throughout the decade. In 1935 she married director and screenwriter Henri Decoin, who encouraged her to pursue work in Hollywood. She subsequently signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios and starred opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in The Rage of Paris in 1938, after which she chose to return to Paris.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Darrieux continued to work in film, a choice that drew sharp criticism from fellow French citizens. Reports indicated that her brother had been threatened with deportation by Alfred Greven, the German manager of Continental, the sole film production company permitted to operate in occupied France. She divorced Decoin and married Porfirio Rubirosa, a Dominican Republic diplomat, in 1942 in Vichy, in a ceremony attended by other diplomats then residing in the city. When Rubirosa's anti-Nazi views led to his forced residence in Germany, Darrieux agreed to make a promotional trip to Berlin in exchange for his release. The couple subsequently lived in Switzerland until the war's end and divorced in 1947. She married scriptwriter Georges Mitsikidès in 1948, and they remained together until his death in 1991.

The postwar decades brought some of her most celebrated screen work. In 1950 she starred in Max Ophüls' La Ronde, and Marcel Ophüls later described her as his father's favorite performer. She appeared in the MGM musical Rich, Young and Pretty in 1951, then returned to Hollywood at the invitation of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz to star alongside James Mason in 5 Fingers in 1952. Back in France, she reunited with Ophüls for The Earrings of Madame de... in 1953, opposite Charles Boyer, and appeared in The Red and the Black in 1954 with Gérard Philippe. She starred in Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1955, a film whose subject matter led Catholic censors in the United States to prohibit it, and took a supporting role in the United Artists epic Alexander the Great in 1956, starring Richard Burton and Claire Bloom. At director Lewis Gilbert's request, she traveled to England to film The Greengage Summer with Kenneth More in 1961. In 1963 she starred in the romantic comedy La Robe Mauve de Valentine at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris, a production adapted from a novel by Françoise Sagan.

Jacques Demy cast her in his 1966 film musical The Young Girls of Rochefort in a role that distinguished her from the rest of the principal cast: she performed her own singing parts, while all other lead actors had their vocals dubbed by separate performers. During the same decade she also worked as a concert singer. She later collaborated with Demy again on Une chambre en ville in 1982, an operatic musical melodrama, and once more provided her own vocals.

Darrieux's Broadway career ran from 1969 to 1972. In 1970 she replaced Katharine Hepburn in the Broadway musical Coco, a production built around the life of Coco Chanel that had been conceived largely as a vehicle for Hepburn and closed shortly after Darrieux assumed the role. In 1971 and 1972 she appeared in The Ambassador, another short-lived Broadway production.

In 1985 Darrieux received an Honorary César Award in recognition of her contributions to the film industry. Her career extended into the twenty-first century; in 2007 she provided the voice of the protagonist's grandmother in the animated feature Persepolis, a film addressing the effects of the Islamic revolution on a young woman growing up in Iran. Darrieux died on 17 October 2017, five months after reaching her one hundredth birthday, from complications following a fall.