Small Dutch collectors card.

Yesterday's star was indeed CC, Claudia Cardinale. Well done, Tommy, Agnieszka, Sophia, and MoonlitDoor. For today, we have a double guess. Guess who these two women are...

About the cards: they must date from the early 1960s. We think someone took photos of magazine pictures. According to the seller at Marktplaats, all the photos had been published in Dutch Oh-la-la magazines like De Lach, in English 'The Smile'. A little anecdote: as young kids in the 1960s, Truus and I read 'De Lach' at home. My parents received these magazines from our grandmother. Grandma never read them, but out of pity for the man who sold the magazines, she refused to cancel the subscription and gave the magazines to my father. As young kids, Truus and I loved the magazines too, and like serious beauty-contestant judges, we gave all the models numbers for who we liked best. Join the fun and guess who today's film star is. And you may give her a number too!

Greetings from Amsterdam, Bob

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Tags:   Nancy Sinatra Nancy Sinatra American Actress Singer Tina Sinatra Tina Sister Collectors Card Verzamelkaart Sammelkarte Actrice Star Film Cine Kino Cinema Picture Screen Movie Movies Filmster Vintage Guess Who Starlet Dutch

© All Rights Reserved

Dutch postcard. Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! means Happy New Year!

Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) was ‘Sweden's illustrious gift to Hollywood’. In the 1940’s the fresh and naturally beautiful actress won three times the Oscar, twice the Emmy, and once the Tony Award for Best Actress. Little known is that before she went to Hollywood she already had a European film career. She was born in Stockholm to a Swedish father and a German mother. She had had a taste of acting at age 17 when she played an uncredited role of a girl standing in line in the Swedish film Landskamp (1932, Gunnar Skoglund). The next year she was accepted to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, but she soon decided that stage acting was not for her. During her first summer break, she was hired at a Swedish film studio to work in films full time. Her first film part was in Munkbrogreven (1935, Edvin Adolphson), where she had a speaking part as Elsa Edlund. She soon was to become Sweden's most promising young actress.

The following years Ingrid Bergman made a dozen films in Sweden that established her as a class actress. Among them were Bränningar (1935, Ivar Johansson) and Dollar (1938, Gustaf Mollander). Another film, En kvinnas ansikte (1938, Gustav Molander) would later be remade as A Woman's Face with Joan Crawford. Ingrid also made a film in Germany, Die Vier Gesellen (1938, Carl Froelich). Her breakthrough film was Intermezzo (1936, Gustaf Molander), in which she played a pianist who has a love affair with a celebrated and married violinist, played by Gösta Ekman. Hollywood producer David O. Selznick saw it and sent a representative from MGM to gain the rights to the story and have the actress signed to a contract. Ingrid went to California and starred in MGM's remake Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939, Gregory Ratoff), reprising her original role. The film was a hit and so was Ingrid. Her beauty was unlike anything the movie industry had seen before and her acting was superb. She was under contract to go back to Sweden to film En enda natt (1939, Gustaf Molander) and Juninatten (1940, Per Lindberg). Back in the USA she appeared in three films, all well-received. In 1942 she played in only one film, but Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) would make her a huge star.

Sources: Wikipedia, Hitchcock.tv and IMDb.

Tags:   Vintage Postcard European Film Star Actress Cinema Movies Ingrid Bergman Happy New Year Swedish

© All Rights Reserved

German Postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3790/1. Photo: Baumann / Ufa.

Swedish-born German film actress Kristina Söderbaum (1912-2001) was considered the prototype of an Aryan woman during the Third Reich. The blonde, blue-eyed star played the lead in several Nazi propaganda films directed by her husband Veit Harlan (1899-1964). After the war this would lead to a speedy end of her career. As two of her characters in Harlan’s melodramas committed suicide by drowning, the public gave her the nickname ‘Reichswasserleiche’ (literally for "most prominent water corpse in the Reich"). Söderbaum was born in Stockholm as the daughter of professor Henrik Gustaf Söderbaum, head of the Nobel Prize Committee. (During WW II she would become an honoury student at Uppsala University.) After graduation, she went to Paris to learn French and by chance got a role in the short instruction film Hur behandlar du din hund? (1934, Arne Bornebusch). In 1935, she studied art history in Berlin and attended acting classes with actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Her first film in Germany was Onkel Bräsig (1936, Erich Waschneck). Then she got to know director Veit Harlan and they fell in love.

Kristina Söderbaum skyrocketed to fame in Jugend (1938, Veit Harlan) and automatically joined the inner circle surrounding propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. With Harlan directing and another prominent Nazi sympathizer, Thea Von Harbou, supplying the screenplays, she played the typical modest and selfless maiden in government-sanctioned melodramas such as Die Reise Nach Tilsit (1939) and Das unsterbliche Herz (1939). The worst was the anti-semitic historical melodrama Jud Süß (1940). After that she starred in the pompous Der grosse König (1942), the hugely popular melodrama Die goldene Stadt (1942), Immensee (1943) and Kolberg (1945). Strangely, her popularity remained somewhat intact in the early post-war years but she reportedly refused all offers because Harlan was banned from working by the Allied occupation forces. Acquitted three times for collaborating with the past regime, he was finally allowed to resume work. Although they continued to make seven more films, the couple was definitely past their prime. After Harlan's death in 1964 Kristina Söderbaum established herself as a portrait and fashion photographer in Germany and wrote her memoirs, Nichts bleibt immer so (1983). She seldom appeared in a film but made an interesting come-back in the arthouse production Karl May (1974, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg). Her last film was the low-budget thriller Night Train to Venice (1994, Carlo U. Quinterio) starring Hugh Grant. On 12 February 2001, she died in Northern Germany. Harlan and she had two children.

Sources: AllMovie, Cyranos.ch, Wikipedia and IMDb.

Tags:   Film Star European Cinema Movies Vintage Postcard Actress Kristina Söderbaum Veit Harlan Jud süss Nazi Cinema Die goldene Stadt

© All Rights Reserved

French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, license holder for Ufa, no. CK-43. Photo: Universal Film, Inc.

American film actor Tony Curtis (1925-2010) played a variety of roles, from light comedy, such as the musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), to serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. From 1949, he appeared in more than 100 films and made frequent television appearances.

Tony Curtis was born Bernard Herschel Schwartz in 1925 in Manhattan, New York City. He was the eldest of three children of Helen (Klein) and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His mother was later in life diagnosed with schizophrenia. His brother Robert was institutionalised with the same mental illness. Curtis himself admits that while he had almost no formal education, he was a student of the "school of hard knocks" and learned from a young age that the only person who ever had his back was himself, so he learned how to take care of both himself and younger brother, Julius. Curtis grew up in poverty, as his father, Emanuel, who worked as a tailor, had the sole responsibility of providing for his entire family on his meager income. This led to constant bickering between Curtis's parents over money, and Curtis began to go to movies as a way of briefly escaping the constant worries of poverty and other family problems. The financial strain of raising two children on a meager income became so tough that in 1935, Curtis's parents decided that their children would have a better life under the care of the state and briefly had Tony and his brother admitted to an orphanage. During this lonely time, the only companion Curtis had was his brother, Julius, and the two became inseparable as they struggled to get used to this new way of life. Weeks later, Curtis's parents came back to reclaim custody of Tony and his brother, but by then Curtis had learned one of life's toughest lessons: the only person you can count on is yourself. In 1938, shortly before Tony's Bar Mitzvah, tragedy struck when Tony lost the person most important to him when his brother, Julius, was hit by a truck and killed. After that tragedy, Curtis's parents became convinced that formal education was the best way Tony could avoid the same never-knowing-where-your-next-meal-is-coming-from life that they had known. However, Tony rejected this because he felt that learning about literary classics and algebra wasn't going to advance him in life as much as some real hands-on life experience would. He was to find that real-life experience a few years later when he enlisted in the navy in 1942 after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Inspired by Cary Grant's role in Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves, 1943) and Tyrone Power's in Crash Dive (Archie Mayo, 1943), he joined the Pacific submarine force. Tony spent over two years getting that life experience doing everything from working as a crewman on a submarine tender, the USS Proteus (AS-19), to honing his future craft as an actor performing as a sailor in a stage play at the Navy Signalman School in Illinois.

In 1945, Tony Curtis was honorably discharged from the navy, and when he realised that the GI Bill would allow him to go to acting school without paying for it, he now saw that his lifelong pipe dream of being an actor might actually be achievable. Curtis auditioned for the New York Dramatic Workshop and was accepted on the strength of his audition piece, a scene from 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' in pantomime. In 1947, he studied acting under the influential German stage director Erwin Piscator. His contemporaries included Elaine Stritch, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Beatrice Arthur, and Rod Steiger. He then began to pay his dues by appearing in a slew of stage productions, including 'Twelfth Night' and 'Golden Boy'. While still at college, Curtis was discovered by Joyce Selznick, the notable talent agent, casting director, and niece of film producer David O. Selznick. After seeing his potential, Selznick arranged an interview for Curtis to see David O. Selznick at Universal Studios, where the 23-years-old Curtis was offered a seven-year contract. He changed his name from Bernard Schwartz to what he saw as an elegant, mysterious moniker, Tony Curtis, named after the novel 'Anthony Adverse' (1936) by Hervey Allen and a cousin of his named Janush Kertiz. Curtis began making a name for himself by appearing in small, offbeat roles in small-budget productions. His first notable performance was a two-minute role as a rumba dancer in Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949), in which he makes Burt Lancaster jealous by dancing with Yvonne De Carlo. This offbeat role resulted in Curtis's being typecast as a heavy for the next few years, such as playing a gang member in City Across the River (Maxwell Shane, 1949), starring Stephen McNally. Curtis continued to build up a showreel by accepting any paying job, acting in a number of bit-part roles for the next few years. It wasn't until late 1949 that he finally got the chance to demonstrate his acting flair when he was cast in an important role in an action-Western, Sierra (Alfred E. Green, 1950) starring Audie Murphy. On the strength of his performance in that film, Curtis was finally cast in a big-budget movie, Winchester '73 (Anthony Mann, 1950). While he appears in that film only very briefly, it was a chance for him to act alongside a Hollywood legend, James Stewart.

Tony Curtis was receiving numerous fan letters, so Universal awarded him the starring role in The Prince Who Was a Thief (Rudolph Maté, 1951), a Swashbuckler set in the Middle East with Piper Laurie. It was a hit at the box office and Curtis was now established. He followed it up with a role as a boxer in the Film Noir Flesh and Fury (Joseph Pevney, 1952), with Jan Sterling. His next films were the comedy No Room for the Groom (Douglas Sirk, 1952), and Son of Ali Baba (Kurt Neumann, 1952), another film set in the Arab world with Piper Laurie. Curtis then teamed up with then-wife Janet Leigh in Houdini (George Marshall, 1953), in which Curtis played the title role. He reunited with Burt Lancaster in the prestigious action drama Trapeze (Carol Reed, 1956). It was one of the biggest hits of the year. As his career developed, Tony Curtis wanted to act in films that had social relevance, ones that would challenge audiences. He achieved his first serious recognition as a dramatic actor in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) with co-star Burt Lancaster. The following year he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) alongside Sidney Poitier who was also nominated in the same category. Curtis then gave what could arguably be called his best performance: three interrelated roles in the now-classic comedy Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) opposite Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. That was followed by Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards, 1959) with Cary Grant. These frantic comedies displayed his impeccable comic timing. He often collaborated with Edwards on later films. In 1960, Curtis played a supporting role in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). He was advised against appearing as the subordinate sidekick in Spartacus, playing second fiddle to the equally famous Kirk Douglas. However, Curtis saw no problem with this because the two had recently acted together in dual leading roles in The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958). Spartacus became another major hit for him.

Tony Curtis's stardom and film career declined considerably after 1960. Curtis took on the role of the Ukrainian Cossack Andrei in the historical action romance epic Taras Bulba (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) featuring Yul Bryner and also with German actress Christine Kaufmann, who became Curtis' second wife. Curtis then focused on comedies such as Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964), with Natalie Wood; The Great Race (Blake Edwards, 1965), with Wood and Jack Lemmon, and Boeing Boeing (John Rich, 1965) a sex farce with Jerry Lewis. His most significant dramatic part came in 1968 when he starred in the true-life drama The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968), which some consider his last major film role. The part reinforced his reputation as a serious actor with his chilling portrayal of serial killer Albert DeSalvo. He later starred alongside Roger Moore in the TV series The Persuaders!, with Curtis playing American millionaire Danny Wilde. The series ran twenty-four episodes. In 2008, he published his autobiography 'American Prince: A Memoir' in which he accused many people he worked with of holding anti-Semitic views. He settled in Henderson, Nevada, where he eventually died in 2010. He was 85. Tony Curtis was married six times and had six children. His wives were actress Janet Leigh (1951-1962), German actress Christine Kaufmann (1963-1968), Leslie Curtis (1968-1982), Andrea Savio (1984 - 1992), Lisa Deutsch (1993-1994), and Jill Vandenberg Curtis (1998-2019 - his death). He was the father of Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis (with Janet Leigh), Allegra Curtis, and Alexandra Curtis (with Christine Kaufmann), Nicholas Curtis, and Benjamin Curtis (with Leslie Curtis). He became largely estranged from all six of his children. His son Nicholas Curtis, died of seizures due to an overdose of heroin in 1994. He disinherited all of his children from his will and left the bulk of his estate to his wife Jill Vandenberg Curtis, who was 46 years younger than he.

Source: James Briggs (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Tags:   Tony Curtis Tony Curtis American Actor Hollywood Film Star Beefcake Boxing Cinema Film Cine Kino Screen Movie Movies Star Hunk Vintage Postcard Postkarte Carte Postale Cartolina Tarjet Postal Postkaart Briefkarte Briefkaart Ansichtskarte Ansichtkaart P.I. Ufa Universal

© All Rights Reserved

Small Dutch collectors card.

Greta, Florimund, Philip (again!), and Sophia, you were all right: yesterday's star was elegant Suzy Parker Thank, you for joining Guess who! And who's today's star?

About the cards: they must date from the early 1960s. We think someone took photos of magazine pictures. According to the seller at Marktplaats, all the photos had been published in Dutch Oh-la-la magazines like De Lach, in English 'The Smile'. A little anecdote: as young kids in the 1960s, Truus and I read 'De Lach' at home. My parents received these magazines from our grandmother. Grandma never read them, but out of pity for the man who sold the magazines, she refused to cancel the subscription and gave the magazines to my father. As young kids, Truus and I loved the magazines too, and like serious beauty-contestant judges, we gave all the models numbers for who we liked best. Join the fun and guess who today's film star is. And you may give her a number too!

P.S. Both my parents still live and are very old now, but my father is very ill at the moment. So my sister (Truus) and I will have to take care of him. The uploading of the cards may therefore be irregular in the coming weeks. But I do hope Jan will keep the homefires at Flickr burning.

Greetings from Amsterdam, Bob

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Tags:   Dutch Collectors Card Verzamelkaart Sammelkarte Actress Actrice Star Film Cine Kino Cinema Picture Screen Movie Movies Filmster Vintage Guess Who Starlet

© All Rights Reserved