Mel Ferrer (August 25, 1917 – June 2, 2008) was an American actor, film director and film producer.
Ferrer was born Melchor Gastón Ferrer in Elberon, New Jersey, of Cuban and Irish descent. His father, Dr. José María Ferrer (1857–1920), was born in Cuba, was an authority on pneumonia and served as chief of staff of St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City. His American mother, the former Mary Matilda Irene O'Donohue (1878–1967), was a daughter of coffee broker Joseph J. O'Donohue, New York's City Commissioner of Parks, a founder of the Coffee Exchange, and a founder of the Brooklyn-New York Ferry. An ardent opponent of Prohibition, Irene Ferrer was named, in 1934, the New York State chairman of the Citizens Committee for Sane Liquor Laws.
Ferrer had three siblings. His elder sister was Dr. M. Irené Ferrer, a cardiologist and educator, who helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram. His brother, Dr. Jose M. Ferrer, was a surgeon. His other sister, Teresa (Terry) Ferrer, was the religion editor of The New York Herald Tribune and education editor of Newsweek. The family is not related to actors José or Miguel Ferrer.
Audrey Hepburn (born Audrey Kathleen Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time who was ranked as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. Remembered as both a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century, Hepburn redefined glamour with "elfin" features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Givenchy and earned her place in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame.
Born in Ixelles, a district of Brussels, Hepburn spent her childhood between Belgium, England and the Netherlands, including German-occupied Arnhem during the Second World War, where she studied ballet with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1948 to continue ballet training with Marie Rambert and perform as a chorus girl in West End musical theatre productions.
After appearing in several British films and starring in the 1951 Broadway play Gigi, Hepburn gained instant Hollywood stardom for playing the Academy Award-winning lead role in Roman Holiday (1953). Later performing in Sabrina (1954), The Nun's Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), My Fair Lady (1964) and Wait Until Dark (1967), Hepburn became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age who received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and accrued a Tony Award for her theatrical performance in the 1954 Broadway play Ondine. Hepburn remains one of few people who have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Awards.
Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (French pronunciation: [lɛzli kaʁɔ̃]; born 1 July 1931) is a French film actress and dancer, who appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. In 2006, her performance in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit won her an Emmy for guest actress in a drama series. Her autobiography Thank Heaven, was published in 2010 in the UK and US, and in 2011 in a French version.
Caron is best known for the musical films An American in Paris (1951), Lili (1953), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), and for the non-musical films Fanny (1961), The L-Shaped Room (1962), and Father Goose (1964). She received two Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. She speaks French, English, and Italian. She is one of the few dancers or actresses who has danced with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Rudolf Nureyev.
Caron was born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Seine (now Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine), France, the daughter of Margaret (née Petit), an American dancer on Broadway, and Claude Caron, a French chemist. Caron was prepared for a performing career from childhood by her mother.
Lana Turner (February 8, 1921 - June 29, 1995) was an American actress.
Discovered and signed to a film contract by MGM at the age of sixteen, Turner first attracted attention in They Won't Forget (1937). She played featured roles, often as the ingenue, in such films as Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). During the early 1940s she established herself as a leading actress in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and Somewhere I'll Find You (1942). She is known as one of the first Hollywood scream queens thanks to her role in the 1941 horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and her reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her performance in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Her popularity continued through the 1950s, in such films as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Peyton Place (1957), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
In 1958, her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed Turner's lover Johnny Stompanato to death. A coroner's inquest brought considerable media attention to Turner and concluded that Crane had acted in self defense. Turner's next film, Imitation of Life (1959), proved to be one of the greatest successes of her career, but from the early 1960s, her roles were fewer.
Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland (born 22 October 1917), known professionally as Joan Fontaine, is a British American actress. She and her elder sister Olivia de Havilland are two of the last surviving leading ladies from Hollywood of the 1930s, at ages 94 and 95 respectively.
Fontaine is the only actress to have won an Academy Award for a performance in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Suspicion.
She was born in Tokyo, Fontaine is the younger daughter of Walter Augustus de Havilland, a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, and Lillian Augusta Ruse, a British actress known by her stage name of Lillian Fontaine. Her parents married in 1914, and were divorced in April 1925.
Joan Fontaine is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Her paternal cousin was Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the famous de Havilland Mosquito aeroplane. Fontaine became an American citizen in April 1943. Reportedly a sickly child who developed anaemia following a combined attack of the measles and a streptococcal infection,[dead link] her mother moved her and her sister to the United States upon the advice of a physician.
Plot
Biographic made-for-TV movie of the life of one of Hollywood's most famous actreses: Audrey Hepburn, spaning from her early childhood to the 1960's which details her life as Dutch overachieving ballerina, coming to grips with her parents divorce and enduring five hard years of living in Nazi occupied Holland during World War II. Audrey then settles in the USA where she tries to make it big as a movie actress and the emotional trials that follow her with it.
Keywords: 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, actress, anorexia, baby, ballerina, based-on-true-story, behind-the-scenes, broadway-manhattan-new-york-city
Audrey Hepburn: [after receiving an Academy Award] I would like to thank my mother, who taught me to stand up straight, sit erect, use discipline with wine and sweets, and only smoke six cigarettes a day.
Truman Capote: [Watching Audrey continually fail to eat the breakfast pastry - in front of Tiffany and Co] See why I didn't want Hepburn for this? She can't eat. Marilyn Monroe is who I wanted. Marilyn Monroe knows how to eat.