Louis Jourdan

Louis Jourdan, born Louis Robert Gendre on 19 June 1921 in Marseille, France, was a French actor whose career spanned film, television, and Broadway from the 1940s through the 1980s. He died on 14 February 2015. One of three sons born to Yvonne (née Jourdan) and Henry Gendre, a hotel owner, he took his mother's surname professionally. His education took him across France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and he trained formally at the École Dramatique, where he began working on the professional stage. That stage work brought him to the attention of director Marc Allégret, who first employed him as an assistant camera operator on Entrée des Artistes before casting him in Le Corsaire (1939) opposite Charles Boyer — a production interrupted by the Second World War and never completed.

During the war, Jourdan appeared in La Comédie du bonheur (1940) in Rome and was filming Untel Père et Fils in that city when Italy declared war on France. He returned to France and appeared in Premier rendez-vous (1941) with Danielle Darrieux. After a period on a work gang, he refused orders to make German propaganda films and fled to unoccupied France, where he made ten films over two years, several of them for Allégret, including L'Arlésienne (1942) with Raimu and Les Petites du quai aux fleurs (1944). His father was arrested by the Gestapo but later escaped and joined the French Resistance along with the rest of the family. Jourdan himself participated in the Resistance, printing and distributing illegal leaflets. Following the liberation of France in 1945, he returned to Paris and married his childhood sweetheart, Berthe Frédérique Takar, on 11 March 1946.

A talent scout working for producer David O. Selznick spotted Jourdan in a French film and offered him a Hollywood contract in March 1946. His first American film was Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), starring Gregory Peck, though Hitchcock had not wanted Jourdan for the role. He starred opposite Joan Fontaine in Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), a film whose producer, John Houseman, noted that Jourdan's quality of seeming not entirely present served the character's defect of memory. MGM borrowed him for Madame Bovary (1949), and after buying out his Selznick contract for $50,000, he moved to 20th Century Fox, where he appeared in Bird of Paradise (1951), Anne of the Indies (1951), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and The Happy Time (1952). He reunited with Fontaine for Decameron Nights (1953) before returning to France for Rue de l'Estrapade (1953).

Following Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Jourdan made his Broadway debut in the lead role of Billy Rose's stage adaptation of André Gide's novel The Immoralist. He returned to Broadway for a short run in 1955, the same year he made his American television debut as Inspector Beaumont in the series Paris Precinct. In 1956 he appeared alongside Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness in The Swan for MGM, and tormented Doris Day in the thriller Julie (1956). He then traveled to France for The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful (1956) with Brigitte Bardot and Escapade (1957), and appeared in the British swashbuckler Dangerous Exile (1957).

Jourdan's most prominent film role came in Gigi (1958), the screen adaptation of Colette's novella, in which he played the romantic lead alongside Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier. The film won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He followed it with The Best of Everything (1959) and co-starred with Frank Sinatra, Chevalier, and Shirley MacLaine in Can-Can (1960). He appeared in The V.I.P.s (1963) for MGM alongside an ensemble cast. During the out-of-town tryout of the Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965) at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, Jourdan sang the leading male role, but was replaced by John Cullum before the production reached Broadway.

Jourdan's Broadway career extended across three decades, from 1954 to 1984, encompassing the productions Tonight in Samarkand, The Immoralist, Gigi, and 13 Rue de l'Amour. On television, he played Dracula in the 1977 BBC production Count Dracula and appeared as a murderous food critic in the 1978 Columbo episode "Murder Under Glass." During the 1970s he recorded a series of spoken word albums of the Babar the Elephant books for Caedmon Records. He played Anton Arcane in Swamp Thing (1982) and its sequel The Return of Swamp Thing (1989), and portrayed the villain Kamal Khan in the James Bond film Octopussy (1983).