Mel Ferrer

Melchor Gastón Ferrer, born August 25, 1917, in Elberon, New Jersey, was an American actor, director, and producer whose career spanned film, theatre, and television across several decades. He died on June 2, 2008. Of Cuban and Irish descent, Ferrer was the son of Dr. José María Ferrer, a Havana-born physician who served as chief of staff at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City and was recognized as an authority on pneumonia, and Mary Matilda Irene O'Donohue, whose father, Joseph J. O'Donohue, was New York City's Commissioner of Parks, a founder of the Coffee Exchange, and a founder of the Brooklyn-New York Ferry. Ferrer's father was 59 at the time of his birth and died three years later. His mother, known as Irene Ferrer, was named New York State chairman of the Citizens Committee for Sane Liquor Laws in 1934.

Ferrer had three siblings, each of whom pursued distinguished careers. His elder sister, Dr. María Irené Ferrer, was a cardiologist and educator who contributed to the refinement of the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram and died in 2004 at age 89. His brother, Dr. Jose M. Ferrer, was a surgeon who died in 1982 at age 70. His younger sister, Teresa Ferrer, served as religion editor of the New York Herald Tribune and as an education editor for Newsweek, dying in 2002 at age 82.

Ferrer received his early education at the Bovée School in New York, where a classmate was the future author Louis Auchincloss, and at Canterbury Prep School in Connecticut. He attended Princeton University but left after his sophomore year to pursue acting. While at Princeton, he won the Theatre Intime award in 1937 for best new play by an undergraduate, a work titled Awhile to Work, which co-starred Frances Pilchard, whom he married later that year. Before his Broadway career took hold, he worked as an editor at a small Vermont newspaper and authored the children's book Tito's Hats, published by Garden City Publishing in 1940.

Ferrer began performing on Broadway in 1940, with his first acting roles coming in a revival of Kind Lady and in Cue for Passion, both that same year. He had previously appeared as a chorus dancer in two unsuccessful musicals, Cole Porter's You Never Know and Everywhere I Roam, before a bout with polio interrupted his early career. He subsequently worked as a disc jockey in Texas and Arkansas and spent time in Mexico. Returning to Broadway, he appeared in Strange Fruit during the 1945–46 season, a play based on the novel by Lillian Smith and directed by José Ferrer, to whom he was not related. He then directed José Ferrer in the 1946 stage production of Cyrano de Bergerac. His Broadway career extended through 1954, culminating in his starring role in Ondine alongside Audrey Hepburn. Along with Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Joseph Cotten, Ferrer was a co-founder of the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.

During the early 1940s, Ferrer was contracted to Columbia Pictures as a director, working alongside other dialogue directors including Fred Sears, William Castle, Henry Levin, and Robert Gordon. His directorial credits at Columbia included Louisiana Hayride, They Live in Fear, Sergeant Mike, Together Again, Meet Miss Bobby Socks, Let's Go Steady, Ten Cents a Dance, and A Thousand and One Nights, all from 1944 and 1945. He also directed The Girl of the Limberlost in 1945, starring Ruth Nelson.

Ferrer made his screen acting debut in Lost Boundaries in 1949, playing a Black man who passes for white in a film that was both controversial and widely acclaimed. At RKO, he appeared in a supporting role in Born to Be Bad in 1950, directed by Nicholas Ray, and directed Claudette Colbert in The Secret Fury that same year. He also directed or co-directed Vendetta, The Racket, and Macao at that studio. He starred as a bullfighter in The Brave Bulls for director Robert Rossen at Columbia in 1951 and appeared opposite Arthur Kennedy in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious in 1952.

At MGM, Ferrer replaced Fernando Lamas as the villain in Scaramouche in 1952, a film particularly noted for a lengthy climactic sword fight between Ferrer and Stewart Granger that became one of the production's most celebrated sequences. The studio retained him for Lili in 1953, in which he played the love interest of the title character portrayed by Leslie Caron. Ferrer and Caron also recorded a hit single from the film, "Hi-Lili-Hi-Lo." He followed those successes with Knights of the Round Table in 1954, in which he portrayed King Arthur, another commercial success for the studio. Saadia, made with Cornel Wilde in 1953, was a commercial failure.

Ferrer met Audrey Hepburn at a party, and the two subsequently appeared together on Broadway in Ondine in 1954. They married in Switzerland in September of that year. The couple co-starred in the large-scale production War and Peace in 1956, in which Ferrer played Prince Andrei, and the film was a significant success. Ferrer also produced Hepburn's film Wait Until Dark in 1967 and made a cameo appearance in her Paris When It Sizzles in 1964. In France, he co-starred with Ingrid Bergman in Elena and Her Men in 1956, directed by Jean Renoir.

Ferrer's subsequent film work included The Sun Also Rises and Fräulein, both for 20th Century Fox in 1957 and 1958 respectively, as well as The World, the Flesh and the Devil at MGM in 1959. He starred in Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses in 1960, appeared in the English horror film The Hands of Orlac that same year, and took roles in The Devil and the Ten Commandments and The Longest Day, both in 1962. He portrayed Marcus Aurelius Cleander in The Fall of the Roman Empire in 1964.

Beginning in the 1970s, Ferrer worked extensively in Italian cinema, appearing in several cult films including The Antichrist in 1974, The Black Corsair in 1976, and Nightmare City in 1980. On American television, he directed episodes of The Farmer's Daughter from 1963 to 1966 and appeared in a supporting role in Sex and the Single Girl in 1964. From 1981 to 1984, he appeared on the series Falcon Crest opposite Jane Wyman, playing Angela Channing's attorney and briefly her husband, Phillip Erikson, while also directing several episodes of the series.