Franco Nero was born in 1941 in Parma, Italy. His first lead role was in the spaghetti Western “Django” in 1966. In 1967 he was brought to Hollywood to make the musical “Camelot” where he played Sir Lancelot. He met Vanessa Regdrave on this film and they have a son together. His other international films include “Force 10 from Naverone”, “The Virgin and the Gypsy” and “Die Hard 2”.
TCM Overview:
A handsome Italian leading man, Franco Nero first came to the attention of US audiences as Abel in John Huston’s epic “The Bible…In the Beginning” (1966). The following year, he cut a dashing figure as the youthful Lancelot opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s Guenevere in Joshua Logan’s opulent filming of the hit musical “Camelot”. Since then, Nero has appeared in over 50 motion pictures ranging from “A Quiet Place in the Country” (1968) to “Force Ten From Navaronne” (1978) to “Querelle” (1982) to “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” (1990). More recently, he played an idealistic doctor whose family is touched by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in “Talk of Angels” and was cast as the slain fashion designer in “The Versace Murders” (both 1998).On the small screen, Nero starred as the legendary silent screen actor in “The Legend of Valentino” (ABC, 1975) and later was featured in the miniseries “The Last Days of Pompeii” (ABC, 1984) and “Young Catherine” (TNT, 1991). With actress Vanessa Redgrave, he has a son Carlo Sparanero who is a director.
Rossano Brazzi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1916. He was raised in the city of Florence. He began his career in Italian films in 1938 with “Il destino in tasca”. In 1949 he went to Hollywood to make “Little Women” with June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien and Elizabeth Taylor. He returned to Italy shortly thereafterand resumed his career in Europe. In 1954 he starred in “Three Coins in the Fountain” and thus began twelve years of high profile films including “South Pacific” with Mitzi Gaynor perhaps his most wekk known role. He starred opposite some of the great ladies of the silver screen including Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Deborah Kerr, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Fontaine and Suzanne Pleshette. He died in 1994 at the age of 78.
Dark Purpose, poster, (aka L’INTRIGO), US poster, from top: Shirley Jones, Rossano Brazzi, George Sanders, Micheline Presle, Giorgia Moll, 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Rossano Brazzi’s obituary from “The Independent” newspaper by David Shipman:
As Hollywood’s enormous audience decamped to television in the 1950s the American film industry looked to Europe to help it out. The movie stars of Germany, France and Italy were imported in the hope that their American films would attract large audiences in their native countries. Sophia Loren made it big in the United States after a shaky start. Vittorio Gassmann, arguably the most versatile of the Italians, found it hard to find his niche in America. So for several years Rossano Brazzi was Hollywood’s favourite Italian male, a romantic figure, impeccably groomed and doubtless planning seduction over a candle-lit dinner for two in a Roman trattoria.
This was a role Brazzi played several times – if more successfully in the US than in Italy. After a short stage career Brazzi entered films in 1939, but his only Italian movie of this period to have entered the international repertory is La Tosca (1940),started by Jean Renoir but finished by Carl Koch after the French embassy had advised Renoir to leave the country as more and more Germans poured into Rome.
Given the subject – Rome at the time of Napoleonic invasion – the analogy could not have been lost on Renoir, or on Renoir’s compatriot Michel Simon, who stayed to complete his role as Scarpia. Imperio Argento, a popular actress of her day, was miscast as Tosca, but Brazzi fared better as her Cavaradossi.
La Tosca was not seen in the US until 1947, the third of Brazzi’s pictures to appear there almost simultaneously, attracting the attention of Mervyn Le Roy at MGM, who chose Brazzi to play the professor to June Allyson’s Jo in the second sound version ofLittle Women (1949). He was both strong and sympathetic in the part, qualities little in demand in most of his other English-language movies.
He did not, in fact, return to Italy until 20th Century-Fox filmed John H. Secondari’s novel about three American girls involved in amorous adventures while working in Rome, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), directed by Jean Negulesco. One of the women was played by Jean Peters, who gets Brazzi sacked because the staff aren’t supposed to fraternise with the locals: but because he isn’t exactly pleased when she thinks she’s pregnant by him the role hardly showed him in a pleasant light.
Nor did that in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Joseph Mankiewicz’s analysis of a movie star – Ava Gardner, playing someone very much like herself. Brazzi was the Italian aristocrat who confesses after marriage to her that he’s impotent. Mankiewicz thoughtthe film weakened because he himself did not have the courage to carry out his original intention of making the count homosexual.
The two films typecast Brazzi as a Latin lover likely to be not all what he seems. In David Lean’s Summer Madness (1955) he is the Venetian antiquarian attracting a middle-aged spinster secretary from the mid-West, played by Katharine Hepburn. He may be her first and last fling; she bites her lip on realising that she is only the latest in a long line of adulteries.
In Interlude (1957), he is again married, again seducing an American working in Europe, June Allyson; in The Story of Esther Costello he is a seedy but suave con man who tries to rape the orphan charge of his wife, Joan Crawford. In his third film that year, Legion of the Lost, he journeys into the Sahara with his true love, Sophia Loren, but deserts her when she refuses to let him have his way with her, later trying to kill John Wayne as he digs for water.
This was hardly a CV likely to qualify him for one of the most important movie roles available in 1958. On Broadway, South Pacific had been a triumph for Rodgers and Hammerstein and for Joshua Logan, who directed and who had written the book with Hammerstein.
Brazzi was cast for the film version as the ageing French Polynesian planter who captures the heart of an American nurse, though his singing voice was dubbed Giorgio Tozzi; but even among all the niceness Brazzi’s character remained somewhat dubious, having fathered two children by local women.
The film’s huge success was of no benefit to Brazzi. He continued to work, but chiefly in supporting roles. There were two notable exceptions: Negulesco’s Count Your Blessings (1959), in which he was a French playboy incapable of fidelity to Deborah Kerr, and The Battle of the Via Favorita (1965) as the widower whose re-marriage – to Maureen O’Hara – shocks their children
. He also directed himself in the Italo-American The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t (1965) and, under the pseudonym Edward Ross, SalvareLa Faccia (1969), a.k.a. Psychout for Murder. He also appeared in US teleseries such as Hawaii Five-O, Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart.
David Shipman
The “Independent” newspaper obituary can also be accessed here
Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia of Italian parents in 1938. In 1957 she won a beauty contest which brought her to the Venice Film Festival. Her firt film was the same year in “Goha”. She worked with Luchino Visconti in “Rocco and his Brothers” and “The Leopard”. She starred with Peter Sellers, Capucine and David Niven in “The Pink Panther” in 1963 and with John Wayne and Rita Hayworth in “Circus World”. In 1965 she was in Hollywood making “Blindfold” with Rock Hudson and “The Professionals” with Burt Lancaster. In Spain in 1968 she made the classic epic Western “Once Upon A Time in the West” with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. She lives in Paris.
Claudia Cardinale
“Claudia Cardinale , with her alluring eyes and husky voice, was one of the more desirable European imports of the 1960s and her hesitation with the English language only made made her that much more appealing” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors”. (2003).
TCM overview:
Though the international film market was glutted with sultry European actresses during the 1960s, few could boast the depth and range of talent as Claudia Cardinale. Blessed with an extraordinary face and figure, Cardinale began her career as lovely window dressing in films like “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958). But she soon proved to the cinematic community that her screen abilities were far greater than her photogenic nature, as evidenced by nuanced turns in “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961), Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963) and Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard.” By the mid-1960s, she rivaled such fellow international stars as Sophia Loren and Catherine Denueve in worldwide popularity, but after starring in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1969), she retreated to European features, where she continued to hone her craft in films like Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). Fondly remembered by movie fans the world over for her equally dazzling looks and talent, Cardinale remained the definition of a true movie star for over five decades.
She was born Claude Josephine Rose Cardinale (pronounced “Car-din-arl-ay”) to French and Sicilian parents on April 15, 1938 in La Goulette, a predominately Italian neighborhood in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. She grew up speaking her mother’s native language, French, and Tunisian Arabic, and did not learn Italian until she began her acting career. Initially, Cardinale wanted to be a teacher, but after entering and winning a 1957 contest to find the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” her path to film stardom was set. The first prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where her earthy beauty captured the attention of the European press. After a two-month stint at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National film school), Cardinale made her feature film debut in Jacques Baratier’s “Goha” (1957), starring Omar Sharif. She then received a seven-year contract from Vides Cinematografica, a production company run by producer Franco Cristaldi who, like Cardinale, had been born in Tunis.
What Cristaldi did not know was that Cardinale was pregnant at the time of their meeting. The French father was in Tunisia, and had stated that he wanted nothing to do with his offspring. Realizing that to sign Cardinale in such a state would fly in the face of his company’s contract clauses which forbade weight gain and unnecessary fraternization, Cristaldi arranged for Cardinale to deliver the child, a boy named Patrick Frank, in London in 1958. He was then placed in the care of nuns in Italy until the age of 4 ½, when Cardinale’s family cared for him in Tunis. As part of the arrangement, the boy was told that Cardinale was his older sister, not her son. Meanwhile, Cristaldi had brought Cardinale back to Italy, where he began grooming her as a starlet in the mold of Brigitte Bardot. She earned her first international hit with Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958), a fizzy crime farce about a group of hapless criminals who attempt and fail to break into a pawnshop. Cardinale had a minor role as the object of desire, a young girl kept a virtual prisoner by her over-protective husband. A major hit around the world, “Big Deal” thrust Cardinale into the international spotlight.
Though many of Cardinale’s early roles were built largely around her physical attributes, she soon proved herself to be a capable dramatic and comedic actress in a wide variety of films for some of the most acclaimed Italian directors of the 1960s. In “Bell’Antonio” (1960), co-written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, she played the wife of Marcello Mastroianni, whose confusion over sex and love made him a renowned lover with strangers but impotent with her. Luchino Visconti cast her in a minor role in his iconic, neo-realist masterpiece “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960), and she gave a heartbreaking turn as a mistreated showgirl who became the romantic obsession of a teenage boy in Valerio Zurlini’s “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961). By 1963, she had appeared in two of the greatest titles in world cinema – Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963), in which she essentially played herself, an actress named Claudia cast by director Marcello Mastroianni as the “perfect woman,” and Visconti’s criminally underrated “The Leopard” (1963), as the object of unrequited passion by an Italian nobleman (Burt Lancaster) and his nephew (Alain Delon). These and other films helped to mint Cardinale as the thinking man’s sex symbol, and as an actress who could dazzle with her brain as well as her beauty. However, many moviegoers did not know that another actress dubbed her voice in nearly all of her films prior to 1963. At first, this was due to her rudimentary Italian, but as time wore on and her grasp of the language improved, producers continued to rely on dubbing because of her odd pronunciation – Cardinale was, in fact, speaking Italian with a French accent and in a surprisingly deep tone. The first time her actual voice was heard on film was in Fellini’s “8 1/2″.”
American audiences soon took notice of the actress as well, and she made her Hollywood debut in Blake Edwards’ “The Pink Panther” (1963) as a Middle Eastern princess whose prized possession – the titular jewel – is stolen by a master thief, “The Phantom” (David Niven), who is being sought out by Peter Sellers’ inept Inspector Clouseau. More Stateside features followed, including the thriller “Blindfold” (1965) with Rock Hudson, and Richard Brooks’ thrilling Western “The Professionals” (1966), with Cardinale as the wife of an American rancher (Ralph Bellamy) kidnapped by a Mexican bandit (Jack Palance), who is then pursued by a quartet of mercenaries led by Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. During this period, Cardinale also maintained her European career in such films as Visconti’s “Vaghe stele dell’Orsa” (“Stella”) (1965) in which she played a Holocaust survivor who returns to her home in Tuscany to re-ignite an incestuous relationship with her brother.
The following year, while filming the sex comedy “Don’t Make Waves” with Tony Curtis in Los Angeles, Cardinale revealed the truth about her son to the international press. She had fallen in love with her mentor, Cristaldi, who had applied to the Vatican to annul his marriage in order to wed Cardinale. The couple was married in Georgia before returning to Italy to break the news to Patrick. The announcement shocked many fans, but in interviews, both Cristaldi and Cardinale explained that the revelation was made to prevent any negative publicity from affecting the boy. Cardinale soon returned to making films on both sides of the Atlantic; some remarkable, while others modest regional hits or obscurities. The most acclaimed picture during this period was unquestionably Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), the sprawling coda to his “Dollars” trilogy of post-modern Westerns. She played Jill, the woman at the center of a violent, three-way power struggle between a hired gun (Henry Fonda), the mysterious stranger bent on killing him (Charles Bronson), and the bandit (Jason Robards) whom Fonda framed for the murder of Cardinale’s husband. Met with critical and audience disdain upon its release, “Once Upon a Time” was eventually regarded as Leone’s greatest work and one of the finest Westerns ever made.
After her work in the Leone film, Cardinale appeared almost exclusively in European features, many of which never reached American theaters. There were several notable films during this period, including 1969’s “The Red Tent,” an Italian/Soviet production about the 1928 crash of an Italian airship near the North Pole which starred Sean Connery and Peter Finch, and “Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata” (“A Girl in Australia”) (1971), a romantic comedy with Alberto Sordi which earned her a 1972 David for Best Actress. In 1977, she appeared on American television in Franco Zefferelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977) as the adulteress Jesus (Robert Powell) spared from stoning in the Gospel of John. The six-hour miniseries allowed her to return to her native Tunisia, which stood in for Jerusalem.
In 1981, Cardinale played Klaus Kinski’s lover, a brothel owner who finances his mad scheme to build an opera house along the Amazon River in Werner Herzog’s surreal “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). She remained a fixture of European film in the decades that followed, and continued to collaborate with the continent’s top directors, including Liliana Cavani in “The Skin” (1981), which reunited her with Burt Lancaster; Marco Bellocchio in “Henry IV” (1984); Diane Kurys in “A Man in Love” (1987); and Henri Verneuil, who cast her as the matriarch of an Armenian family who emigrates to France after the genocide of 1915 in “Mayrig” (1991) and its sequel, “588 rue paradis” (1992).
During this period, she recounted her lengthy and storied career in a 1995 autobiography, Moi, Claudia, toi, Claudia, and she was feted by award organizations and festivals around the world, including an honorary Golden Lion from the 1993 Venice Film Festival. Cardinale also lent her fame to UNESCO as a goodwill ambassador for the defense of women’s rights beginning in 1999. In 2002, Cardinale received an honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival. Three years later, she published a second book, Mes Etoiles, which recounted more stories from her life in front of the camera. Far from being retired, Cardinale continued to star in three to four films a year, including a critically acclaimed turn as a Tunisian mother unable to come to terms with her French-educated son’s homosexuality in “Le fil” (“The String”) (2009). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
Today, little is written about Marta Toren but she had a fairly profilic Hollywood career. She was born in Stocholm in 1925. She began her career on the stage and then began making films in 1947. In 1949 she was in Hollywood and made “Illegal Entry” with Howard Duff, “Sword in the Desert” with Dana Andrews, “One Way Street” with James Mason, £Deported” with Jeff Chandler and “Sirocco” with Humphrey Bogart. By 1952 she was back in Sweden where she died in 1957 at the age of only 31. A page dedicated to Marta Toren on “Glamour Gils of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.
IMDB Entry:
From an early age her dream was to become an actress. Her first application for acting studies at The Royal Dramatic Theater in 1944 was unsuccessful. After additional dramatic coaching she was finally accepted in 1947. But screenwriter Edwin Blumarranged a screen test for RKO which eventually led to her being offered a contract with Universal Studios. It was a hard choice but she accepted and left her studies after one semester. In Hollywood she quickly made 10 movies, including Sirocco (1951) withHumphrey Bogart. From 1952 she accepted movie offers from Italy with more demanding roles. She married director Leonardo Bercovici on June 13, 1952, and gave birth to a daughter. In early 1957, she went back to Sweden for her stage debut in a play by J.B. Priestley. She died one month later, at the age of 31, of a brain hemorrhage.
Horst Janson was born in 1935 in Germany. He made his acting debut in 1959 in “Buddenbrooks”. His other films include in 1970 “You Can’t Win Em All” with Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson, “The McKenzie Break” , “Murphy’s War” and perhaps his most noteworhty role in “Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter”.
Wikipedia entry:
Horst Janson (b. 1935) is a popular German actor who played Horst on Sesamstrasse from 1979 until 1983. By the time he appeared on the German version of Sesame Street, Janson had already established himself as a star in his homeland and abroad. From 1959 onward, Janson was active in German film and television, culminating in a principal role on the circus drama Salto mortale (as Sascha Dorian). A spate of English-language projects followed, mostly war or escape movies like You Can’t Win ‘Em All,The McKenzie Break, and Murphy’s War (with Peter O’Toole). He also guest starred on Upstairs, Downstairs as the dashing Baron Klaus von Rimmer.
Continuing to migrate between Germany and England, he starred as the title characters on the German TV drama Der Bastian and in the Hammer horror film Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Still other international credits include Shout at the Devil (with Roger Mooreand Ian Holm) and the TV movies To Catch a King (as the German villain) and The Last Days of Patton. He remains an active presence on German television. On December 12, 2012, Janson attended the opening of the Berlin-based exhibition 40 Jahre Sesamstrasse and appeared in a Q&A onstage with Samson (now played by another puppeteer from when he knew the bear). In 2013 he appeared in the documentary Als die Sesamstrasse nach Deutschland kam (“When Sesame Street Came to Germany”), talking about his experience working on the show.
Elissa Landi was born in 1904 in Venice in Italy. She was raised in Austria and educated in England. In the 1920’s she appeared in many Euopean productions. In 1931 she went to Hollywood. She had a few years of big budget films such as “The Sign of the Cross” in 1931 and in 1934 “The Count of Monte Cristo” opposite Robert Donat in his only Hollywood film. She retired from films in 1943. Elissa Landi died in New York in 1948 aged only 43.
Elissa Landi was born in Venice, Italy, on December 6, 1904. From childhood she was fascinated with the stage. As many little girls did at the time, Elissa wanted nothing more than to be a big star on the great stages of Europe. Her acting career started out at local theater companies, eventually leading her to the hallowed stages of London, where she made her debut in “The Storm.” The play lasted for five months and she received rave reviews for her performances. That in turn led to meaty leads in “Lavendar Ladies” and other plays. European film producers took notice of the photogenic beauty and Elissa starred in eight movies over the next two years. Her first film was the German-made Synd (1928). Her career didn’t impress critics, though, until she played Anthea Dane in The Price of Things (1930). Elissa felt that she would make more headway in the U.S., so she arrived in New York in 1931 to star in the stage version of “A Farewell to Arms.” Although the play made no huge impression, Hollywood sat up and took notice, and she soon appeared in Body and Soul (1931) opposite Charles Farrell. However, it wasn’t until Cecil B. DeMille‘s biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932) that many moviegoers got their first glimpse of Elissa, and they were enthralled, even though she was among such heavyweight stars as Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Charles Laughton and Vivian Tobin. Completed in less than eight weeks, the film was a smash hit. After A Passport to Hell (1932) and Devil’s Lottery (1932), Elissa scored again in The Warrior’s Husband (1933), a film about the intrigues and intricacies of the old Roman Empire that starred Marjorie Rambeau and Ernest Truex. In 1934 Elissa co-starred withRobert Donat in the classic The Count of Monte Cristo (1934). The next year saw Elissa in an odd bit of casting as Lisa Robbia in Enter Madame! (1935) with Cary Grant, the era’s greatest leading man. Elissa was required to sing for this part, which she had difficulty doing (her voice was eventually dubbed by a professional singer) and also required her to throw temper tantrums, something else she found difficult to do and for which a double also was eventually used, all to no avail, as the film was a critical and financial flop. After a mediocre role in Mad Holiday (1936), Elissa had a better part as the tormented Selma Landis in the hit After the Thin Man (1936), the second film in the series. She appeared in only three movies after that, the last being the low-budget Corregidor (1943) for bottom-of-the-barrel Producers Releasing Corporation. When that picture was completed, Elissa left films behind and concentrated on writing, producing six novels and books of poetry. Elissa succumbed to cancer on October 21, 1948. She was just 43 years old.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson
Entry by Denny Jackson on IMDB:
The above entry can also be accessed on IMDB online here.
Christine Kaufmann died in a Munich hospital in the night to March 28, 2017. At 72, she lost her battle with leukemia. Her daughters Alexandra and Allegra and her granddaughters Elisabeth and Dido were with her during her final days.
Christine Kaufmann initially thought that she suffered from a flu. The doctors diagnosed her with leukemia. She was last seen on TV on March 12, 2017 in a cooking show on the channel münchen.tv where, according to media reports, she was talking about morning and death, without revealing that she was fighting leukemia.
Christine Kaufmann was born on January 11, 1945 in the Austrian region of Styria. She was the daughter of the German air force officer Johannes Kaufmann and the French theatrical makeup artist Geneviève Gavaert.
On the film website IMDB, Christine Kaufmann has 109 film credits (until 2014). Here a few milestones of her career:
She was a child-star who made her (uncredited) acting debut in 1952 in the movie Im Weissen Rössl, based on Willi Forst’s operetta of the same name. The following year, she was part of the circus movie Salto Mortale with Karlheinz Böhm. In 1954, she rose the greater prominence with her role as “Rose-Girl Resli” (Rosen Resli) in the eponymous film drama based on the book by the Swiss writer Johanna Spyri, who is most famous for her book Heidi.
After a series of German films, she went to Italy. In 1959, she could for instance be seen in the movies Primo amore by director Mario Camerini, in The Last Days of Pompeji with Steve Reeves and in Vacanze d’inverno, an Italian comedy starring famous actors such as Alberto Sordi, Michèle Morgan and Vittorio De Sica.
In 1962, Christine Kaufmann won a Golden Globe for her 1961-Hollywood debut Town Without Pity (DVD at AmazonUSA). She plays a German girl raped by American soldiers. Kirk Douglas plays the role of US major Steve Garrett who defends the rapists and blames the girl for what happened. His attacks push her to commit suicide.
In real life, the friendship of Christine Kaufmann with co-star Kirk Douglas lasted until the end. According to the German tabloid Bild, he prayed for her during her last days.
In the 1962-movie Taras Bulba (DVD at AmazonUSA) Christine Kaufmann (as Natalia Dubrov) starred alongside Yul Brynner (as Taras Bulba) and Tony Curtis (as Andriy Bulba). Still a teenager, she married Tony Curtis the following year, after he had divorced from fellow actress Janet Leigh.
Christine Kaufmann was the second of six wives of Tony Curtis, with whom she had two children, Alexandra (*1964) and Allegra (*1966).
They starred again together in the 1964-movie Wild and Wonderful. However, Kaufmann and Curtis divorced in April 1968. Tony Curtis married a photo model just days after the divorce.
Alexandra and Allegra first stayed with their mother, who moved to Germany in 1969. The couple made headlines with their child custody fight. When the daughters were 6 and 8 and Christine was shooting a movie, Tony flew the girls without her consent from London to the United States. In the end, the children stayed with their father in the United States. According to Allegra Curtis, her mother did not care too much about their children. Luckily, there was the nanny. In 2013, Christine Kaufmann told German media that it was best for the children to stay with their rich and famous father; they all had US passports. For eight or nine years, she had only the right to see her daughters six weeks a year. Therefore, the children later came back to her to Germany. First Alexandra, and roughly a year and a half later Allegra followed.
Christine Kaufmann said about her divorce that she was one and green and, therefore, did not ask Tony Curtis for money. She later regretted it because, just before he died, he disinherited his children in favor of his last wife with whom he had no children.
In Germany, Christine Kaufmann continued her film career and starred in TV episodes of Der Kommissar and Derrick. She made movie such as Der Tod der Maria Malibran in 1971 and Willow Springs in 1973. In 1981, she shot two movies with the famous German director and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Lili Marleen and Lola, in which she had the minor part of Susi; Barbara Sukowa played Lola. Memorable is the TV series by director Helmut Dietl Monaco Franze — Der ewige Stenz, in which she starred as Olga Behrens in 1982. In addition, Christine Kaufmann was a sidekick in 2 of the 24 episodes of the comedy series Harald und Eddi with Harald Juhnke and Eddi Arent.
Christine Kaufmann was not a nun and, in 2014, admitted some affairs, including sex with Eric Clapton, Patrick Süskind and Warren Beatty. Her most influential man was German film, opera and theatre director Peter Zadek, whom she loved all her life although they never became a couple, she told Bild in 2014.
In 1974 and in 1999, Christine Kaufmann posed nude for Playboy; even at 54, she still looked great. From 1999 until 2012, she marketed her own cosmetic and wellness products on the TV shopping channel HSE24. She could also be admired in many theatre plays. In addition, one has to mention Christine Kaufmann’s many books, three of which you can find on this page.
After her divorce from Tony Curtis, Christine Kaufmann was married to TV director Achim Lenz (1974-76), musician and actor Reno Eckstein (1979-1982) and illustrator Klaus Zey (1997-2011).
Christine Kaufmann: Lebenslust. Nymphenburger Verlag, 2014, 134 pages. Order the hardcover book in German from Amazon.com, Amazon.de.
Christine SchmidtmerShip Of Fools, poster, top from left: Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret, Oskar Werner, center from left: Jose Ferrer, Christiane Schmidtmer, George Segal, Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Dunn (bottom pointing), 1965. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Christiane Schmidtmer was born in 1939 in Mannheim, Germany. She was acting on German television when the actor Jose Ferrer recommended her to Stanley Kramer for “Ship of Fools” in 1965. She travelled to Hollywood to make the film with Ferrer, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner. While in the U.S. she also made “Boeing, Boeing” with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis.She divided her time between the U.S,. and Germany. She died in Heidelberg in 2003 at the age of 63.
Her IMDB entry:
Christiane Schmidtmer was born in Mannheim, Germany. She took acting lessons in Munich and worked in the stage in Germany from 1961-1963, then turned to photographic modelling for German nude magazines and later, Playboy. She also modelled for advertising companies, namely Max Factor cosmetics, before she started her movie career.
She was the beautiful mistress of José Ferrer in Ship of Fools (1965), but most people will remember her as the evil wardress in the exploitation women-in-prison film, The Big Doll House (1971), as well as one of the three airline stewardesses in Boeing, Boeing(1965)
Dolph Lundgren was born in 1957 in Stockholm in Sweden. He came to fame with the popularity of action heroes who were muscleed and fit and adept at martial arts. Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all very popular at the same time. Lundgren has a degress in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney. He made his film debut in the James Bond thriller “A View to a Kill” in 1985. His other films include “Rocky Four”, “Showdown in Little Toyko” and more recently “The Expendables”.
Men’s Health Interview:
Critics have never
been kind to Dolph Lundgren. They’ve call him “grinning and glistening” when they’re trying to be nice, and “expressive as wood” when they’re not. “Watching (Lundgren) think hard is a painful experience,” noted aWashington Post review of 1989’s Red Scorpion. “May well be the only man in the universe who can make Mr. (Jean-Claude) Van Damme look like an actor,” a New York Times critic wrote of Lundgren in 1992’s Universal Soldier. Film academic Christine Holmlund, summing up Lundgren’s career in the 2004 book Action and Adventure Cinema, wrote “Lundgren is limited by his size and dead pan delivery: though often compared to Arnold (Schwarzenegger), he has less range.”
For someone who’s had such a difficult time convincing critics of his merit, he’s one of the few action stars who gets respect (and real fear) from his audience. In 2009, three armed and masked burglars broke into Lundgren’s home in Marbella, Spain, tied up his wife, and went about ransacking the place. But then one of them noticed a Lundgren family photo in the bedroom and recognized the action star. He alerted his cohorts, and they made the unanimous decision to flee the crime scene immediately. Apparently they were less concerned with Lundgren’s wooden acting than his ability to break their collective faces. Perhaps they were afraid of ending up like Apollo Creed, who Lundgren famously “killed” in the 1985 filmRocky IV.
To be fair, it’s not completely irrational to be terrified by Lundgren. As Roger Moore, who worked with Lundgren in the James Bond film View To a Kill, once said “Dolph is larger than Denmark.” That’s hyperbole, but just slightly. Lundgren, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, stands at a golem-like 6 foot 5 inches and weighs in at around 250 pounds of pure neck-snapping muscle. Oh, and he also has a black belt in Kyokushin kaikan karate. While filming Rocky IV, he punched Sylvester Stallone so hard that he sent Sly to intensive care for nine days. If that’s not intimidating enough, he’s also smart. Lundgren has a masters in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney, and speaks five languages (Swedish, English, German, French and Japanese). He also dated musician Grace Jones during the 1980s, hung out at the infamous den of disco iniquity Studio 54, and lived in New York City when it was fun and dangerous.
Lundgren’s life has admittedly sometimes been more interesting than his movies. But in recent years, Lundgren has been on the verge of something like a comeback. He was the most two-dimensional part of 2010’s all-star action epic The Expendables, and he returns for the sequel, The Expendables 2, this Friday, August 17. It may not be thought-provoking cinema, but Lundgren’s performance should keep his house safe from burglars for at least another year.
I called Lundgren as he was waiting in LAX to board a flight to Madrid, as part of his world Expendables 2 media tour. He was soft-spoken, humble, and quick to laugh, particularly at himself. In other words, the exact opposite of every movie character he’s ever played.
Men’s Health:Expendables 2 has a lot of stars, and presumably a lot of egos. Did everybody get along?
Dolph Lundgren: Oh yeah. There was just a core group that worked together on most of the movie. It was Sly (Stallone) and me and Jason (Statham) and Terry (Crews) and Randy (Couture) and the Chinese guy, Jet Li. We were the ones working all the time. When guys like Bruce (Willis) and Arnold (Schwarzenegger) came in, it was just for a week or two. But everybody was excited to be part of a team and in a big movie. Some of these guys, like Chuck Norris, haven’t done a film in like seven years. So nobody came with big egos.
MH: Just big entourages?
DL: A few guys had that. They’d show up with a lot of people, especially Arnold and Chuck. Bodyguards and entourages, all that stuff.
MH: I understand the former Governator having bodyguards. But what does Chuck Norris need bodyguards for? I thought he could kill a guy with his pinkie.
DL:(Laughs.) I don’t know about that. Having bodyguards is just part of being famous, I think.
MH: How many bodyguards do you have?
DL: None.
MH: Because you don’t need them, or you could crack somebody’s spine just by staring at them?
DL:(Laughs.) I’m not that good.
MH: Among action stars, is there cheating?
DL: Cheating how?
MH: Like steroids. I talked to Charlie Sheen and he said he used steroids while he was making Major League. And that was a baseball movie.
DL:(Laughs.) That’s funny. Charlie took steroids? That’s probably the mildest form of drug he ever took. No, I like Charlie. I like him a lot. He’s a nice guy. But him saying he took steroids, that’s like me claiming I took aspirin. Anyway, what’s your question?
MH: Are steroids common in action movies? Part of the job requires having big, rippling, cinematic muscles. It must be tempting for some of these stars.
DL: Oh sure. It never was for me, because I was already a big guy when I started making movies. I didn’t need to be any bigger. So steroids didn’t make any sense. But if you’re a regular-sized actor and you’re in a movie where you’re supposed to be some pumped-up guy who takes his shirt off, yeah, steroids make sense.
MH: You’ve seen it?
DL: Well, I… (long pause.) I haven’t witnessed the injections personally. But I recognize when it’s happening. You know which guys are doing steroids and which ones aren’t.
MH: You can tell just by looking?
DL: Oh yeah. It’s pretty obvious. You can see the difference. There’s a soft roundness to steroid muscles that you don’t get when you’re lifting weights or doing martial arts or things like that. I don’t judge anybody. Everybody has their own life and people do what they want. It’s like smoking pot. If you experiment with it, it doesn’t mean you’re the devil, and it doesn’t mean you’ve ruined your body. It just means you tried it.
“Men;s Health” interview can also be accessed online here.
