Drue Leyton

Drue Leyton, born Dorothy Elizabeth Blackman on 12 June 1903 in California or Somers, Wisconsin, was an American actress and member of the French Resistance who also performed under the name Freya Leigh. She died on 2 February 1997 in Corona del Mar, California.

Leyton spent part of her childhood in Mexico, where her father worked as a mining engineer. Her education took her across multiple countries, including the Bennett School for Girls in Millbrook, New York, a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Following a failed marriage, Leyton pursued a career in acting. Her Broadway credits spanned several productions, beginning with We Are No Longer Children in 1932, for which she was billed as Freya Leigh. She also appeared in Green Grow the Lilacs and, in 1937, in both A Hero Is Born and Harvest. That same year she participated in a Works Progress Administration Theatre Project in New York before traveling to England, where she performed in Golden Boy. Her screen work included appearances in several Charlie Chan films.

In 1937, Leyton met Franco-American actor Jacques Terrane, born Jacques Tartière, in New York. The two married in London in 1938. That year, Leyton was acting in Paris and broadcasting for the Voice of America. She also produced and conducted interviews for Radio Mondial, a shortwave station operated by France's Ministry of Information, with programming aimed at American audiences. Her on-air criticisms of the Nazi regime prompted Berlin radio to announce a promise of her execution.

Following the German occupation of northern and western France, Leyton was arrested by the Nazis in September 1942. The authorities detained her as an American woman without discovering her true identity or activities. She secured her release by feigning cancer with the assistance of French doctors and returned to her home in Barbizon in 1942. There she joined the French Resistance, helping 42 downed Allied airmen escape to freedom and sheltering others in her home until the end of the war. During this period she was known as Dorothy Tartière. Sylvia Beach, the American-born owner of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, assisted her at times in hiding the airmen. Her husband Jacques died in Syria in 1941 while fighting with the Free French forces.

Leyton and M. H. Werner later documented her wartime experiences in the book The House Near Paris.