West German postcard by Rüdel Verlag, Hamburg Bergedorf, no. 654. Photo: Romulus / Deutsche London Film. José Ferrer in Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952).
José Ferrer (1912- 1992) was an American actor and film director, who was born in Puerto Rico. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his title role in Cyrano de Bergerac (1951). Ferrer was frequently used as a villain in his later film career.
José Ferrer was born José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón in San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico in 1912. Ferrer's father was Rafael Ferrer, a lawyer, landowner and author who was born and raised in San Juan. Ferrer's mother was María Providencia Cintrón, a native of the coastal town of Yabucoa. Ferrer's paternal grandfather was Dr. Gabriel Ferrer Hernández, who had campaigned for Puerto Rican independence from the Spanish Empire. The Ferrer family moved to New York City in 1914, when José was 2 years old. As a school student, Ferrer was educated abroad at the Institut Le Rosey, a prestigious boarding school located in Rolle, Switzerland. According to the wishes of his father, José should become a concert pianist. Ferrer studied architecture, music and composition at Princeton University. He wrote a dissertation called French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán, about the Spanish naturalist writer Emilia Pardo Bazán. In 1934, Ferrer transferred to Columbia University, where he studied Roman languages. In 1934, while still a college student, Ferrer made his theatrical debut in Long Island-based theatre. In 1935, he was hired as the stage manager at the Suffern Country Playhouse. Later in 1935, Ferrer made his Broadway debut in the comedy play 'A Slight Case of Murder' by Damon Runyon and Howard Lindsay. Ferrer had a major success on Broadway in the play 'Brother Rat' by John Monks Jr. and Fred F. Finklehoffe. The play ran 577 performances from 1936 to 1938. Very successful were also 'Mamba's Daughters (1938) and 'Charley's Aunt' (1940). Even more successful was the 1943 play 'Othello' in which he co-starred as the villainous Iago opposite the Othello of Paul Robeson. 'Othello' was the longest-played Shakespeare play in the United States. The record remains unbroken to this day. In 1946, Ferrer starred in 'Cyrano de Bergerac', his most successful play. He won a Tony Award for his performance. In 1948, Ferrer made his film debut by co-starring with Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (Victor Fleming, 1948). He played the historical monarch Charles VII of France, the ruler who Joan of Arc served during the Hundred Years' War. For his debut role, Ferrer was nominated for an Oscar for Best Male Supporting Actor. Ferrer's success as a film actor, helped him gain more film roles in Hollywood-produced films. He played the smooth-talking hypnotist David Korvo in the Film Noir Whirlpool (Otto Preminger, 1949) with Gene Tierney, and dictator Raoul Farrago in the Film Noir Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950) starring Cary Grant. In 1950, Ferrer won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Cyrano de Bergerac in the film version, Cyrano de Bergerac (Michael Gordon, 1950). He was the first Puerto Rican actor and also the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award.
In 1952, José Ferrer won three Tony Awards for directing three plays, namely 'The Shrike', 'Stalag 17' and 'The Fourposter' and he won another Tony for acting in 'The Shrike'. In 1952, Ferrer played the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the historical drama Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952). His role earned him an Oscar nomination, but the award was instead won by Gary Cooper. The film also marked a financial success for Ferrer, who received 40% of the film's profits. In 1954, Ferrer took on the role of defence attorney Barney Greenwald in The Caine Mutiny. From 1955 onwards, he also directed a number of films, most of which he also starred in as an actor. First, he directed a film version of The Shrike (José Ferrer, 1955). I Accuse! (José Ferrer, 1958) is a reimagining of the Dreyfus Affair. While still critically well-received, several of these films were box office flops. He took a hiatus from film productions. In 1959, he directed a play called 'The Andersonville Trial', about the consequences of the American Civil War. The play featured George C. Scott. He then took over directing the musical 'Juno'. After sixteen performances, the musical stopped due to a lack of success, which was a setback for Ferrer's directing career. Ferrer attempted a comeback as a film director with the sequel film "Return to Peyton Place" (1961) and the musical film "State Fair" (1962). Both films were box office flops. As an actor, Ferrer appeared as a Turkish Bey in the historical drama Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) with Peter O'Toole, as historical monarch Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea in the Bible epic The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Ship of Fools (Stanley Kramer, 1965). In television, Ferrer gained a notable role as the narrator in the pilot episode of the hit sitcom Bewitched (1964). In 1968, he featured as a voice actor, playing the villain Ben Haramed in the TV film The Little Drummer Boy. But at this time, he started having legal troubles. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) accused Ferrer of still owing unpaid taxes since 1962.
José Ferrer had many film roles in the 1970s, but no outstanding highlights. He played one of the many passengers in Voyage of the Damned (Stuart Rosenberg, 1976) with Faye Dunaway, Doctor Vando in Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978) with William Holden and Marthe Keller and Athos in The Fifth Musketeer (Ken Annakin, 1979), starring Beau Bridges and Sylvia Kristel. In the 1980s, he starred in the popular comedy series Newhart as Julia Duffy's father. In the early 1980s, he also played the role of Reuben Marino in the soap opera Another World. In the cinema, he appeared in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (Woody Allen, 1982), To Be or Not to Be (Mel Brooks, 1983) and Dune (David Lynch, 1984), an adaptation of the 1965 novel 'Dune' by Frank Herbert. This was among the last notable roles of Ferrer's long career. Ferred retired from acting entirely in 1991, due to increasing health problems. His last theatrical performance was a production of the generation-gap drama 'Conversations with My Father'. José Ferrer, who spoke perfect French, Italian and German in addition to Spanish and English, was married a total of four times. His wives were Uta Hagen (1938-1948), actress Phyllis Hill (1948-1953) and the singer and actress Rosemary Clooney (1953-1961 / 1964-1967). From 1977 until his death, he was married to Stella Magee. With Uta Hagen, he had a daughter. With Rosemary Clooney, he had five children born between 1955 and 1960. His oldest son, actor Miguel Ferrer (1955-2017) was known for his role in Medical Examiners. He was followed by Maria Ferrer (1956;) Gabriel Ferrer (1957) married to singer Debby Boone, daughter of Pat Boone; Monsita Ferrer (1958) and Rafael Ferrer (1960). Ferrer was the uncle of actor George Clooney. In 1992, José Ferrer died of colorectal cancer at the age of 80 in Coral Gables, Florida. He was buried in Santa Maria Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in Old San Juan in his native Puerto Rico.
Sources: Dimos I (IMDb), Wikipedia (English, German and Dutch) and IMDb.
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Spanish postcard by Proa, no. 519. Photo: Merle Oberon as George Sand and Cornel Wilde as Frédéric Chopin in A Song to Remember (Charles Vidor, 1945). Sent by mail in 1950.
Indian-born British actress Merle Oberon (1911-1979) had her breakthrough as Anna Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). She played leading roles in such British films as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), before she travelled to Hollywood to star in the classics The Dark Angel (1935) and Wuthering Heights (1939).
Dashing Cornel Wilde (1912-1989) was a Hungarian-born Hollywood star. He played Tybalt in Laurence Olivier's 1940 Broadway production of 'Romeo and Julie' when Hollywood spotted him. He leapt to fame and an Oscar nomination as Frédéric Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945). He spent the balance of the 1940s in romantic, and often swashbuckling, leading roles. In the 1950s his star dimmed a little, and aside from an occasional blockbuster like The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), he settled mainly into adventure films.
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Belgian card, no. 751. Photo: Columbia. Anthony Dexterand Eleanor Parker in Valentino (Lewis Allen, 1951).
Anthony Dexter (1913-2001) landed the part of Rudolph Valentino in the actor's biopic Valentino (1951). He was reputed to have won the role from a competitive field of 75,000 aspiring Valentinos. The film's producer, Edward Small, claimed to have made 400 screen tests for the part until discovering Dexter. So much alike was Dexter in appearance to Valentino that Valentino fan clubs, upon learning of Dexter, applauded the choice of him to play their star. Even the press lauded Dexter as "incredible. Although "Valentino" was not the success its producers had hoped for, Dexter managed to garner future parts in movies similar to the roles the real Valentino had played: John Smith in Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953); Captain Kidd in Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl (1954); a pirate leader in The Black Pirates (1954); and Christopher Columbus in The Story of Mankind (1957). After these roles, his career gradually diminished until ultimately he was cast in a bit part in the Julie Andrews' vehicle Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).
American actress Eleanor Parker (1922-2013) appeared in some 80 films and television series. She was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for Caged (1950), Detective Story (1951) and Interrupted Melody (1955). Her role in Caged also won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. One of her most memorable roles was that of the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965). Her biographer Doug McClelland called her ‘Woman of a Thousand Faces’, because of her versatility.
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Spanish card, no. 495. Photo: Columbia. Anthony Dexterand Eleanor Parker in Valentino (Lewis Allen, 1951).
Anthony Dexter (1913-2001) landed the part of Rudolph Valentino in the actor's biopic Valentino (1951). He was reputed to have won the role from a competitive field of 75,000 aspiring Valentinos. The film's producer, Edward Small, claimed to have made 400 screen tests for the part until discovering Dexter. So much alike was Dexter in appearance to Valentino that Valentino fan clubs, upon learning of Dexter, applauded the choice of him to play their star. Even the press lauded Dexter as "incredible. Although "Valentino" was not the success its producers had hoped for, Dexter managed to garner future parts in movies similar to the roles the real Valentino had played: John Smith in Captain John Smith and Pocahontas (1953); Captain Kidd in Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl (1954); a pirate leader in The Black Pirates (1954); and Christopher Columbus in The Story of Mankind (1957). After these roles, his career gradually diminished until ultimately he was cast in a bit part in the Julie Andrews' vehicle Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).
American actress Eleanor Parker (1922-2013) appeared in some 80 films and television series. She was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for Caged (1950), Detective Story (1951) and Interrupted Melody (1955). Her role in Caged also won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. One of her most memorable roles was that of the Baroness in The Sound of Music (1965). Her biographer Doug McClelland called her ‘Woman of a Thousand Faces’, because of her versatility.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Tags: Anthony Dexter Anthony Dexter American Actor Eleanor Parker Eleanor Parker Actress Actrice Hollywood Film Star Movie Star Movie Movies Film Cinema Cine Kino Picture Screen Glamour Allure Vedette Filmster Star Vintage Postcard Carte Postale Cartolina Tarjet Postal Postkarte Postkaart Briefkarte Briefkaart Ansichtskarte Ansichtkaart Valentino 1951
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Swiss postcard by News Productions, Baulmes / Filmwelt Berlin, Bakede / News Productions, Stroud, no. 56511. Photo: COKS /Collection Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne. Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan Groznyy/Ivan the Terrible (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944).
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958).
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Эйзенштейн, tr. Sergey Mikhaylovich Eizenshteyn) was born in 1898 in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire in the Governorate of Livonia). He was the son of the famous architect Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein. Eisenstein was raised as an Orthodox Christian but became an atheist later in life. As a young man, Eisenstein attended the Institute of Civil Engineering in Petrograd. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, he worked as an engineer for the Red Army. In 1920, Eisenstein joined up with the Moscow Proletkult Theater as a set designer and later as a director. The Proletkult's director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, became a big influence on Eisenstein, introducing him to the concept of biomechanics, or conditioned spontaneity. Eisenstein furthered Meyerhold's theory with his own 'The Montage of Attractions, written for art journal LEF. He briefly attended the film school established by Lev Kuleshov and the two were both fascinated with the power of editing to generate meaning and elicit emotion. The 'montage of attractions' is a sequence of pictures whose total emotional effect is greater than the sum of its parts. Eisenstein's and Kuleshov's individual writings and films are the foundations upon which Soviet montage theory was built, but they differed markedly in their understanding of its fundamental principles. Eisenstein's articles and books, particularly 'Film Form' and 'The Film Sense', explain the significance of montage in detail. He later theorised that this style of editing worked in a similar fashion to Marx's dialectic.
In 1923, Sergei Eisenstein made his first film, the short Dnevnik Glumova/Glumov's Diary. It was part of the theatre production 'Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man' (Na vsyakovo mudretsa dovolno prostoty), an 1868 comedy by Alexander Ostrovsky made for the Proletkult organisation. Glumov's Diary marks Eisenstein's transition from theatre stage director to film director. Eisenstein's next film, Stachka/Strike (1925) was his first full-length feature film. The film depicts a strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent suppression of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered. Bronenosets Potyomkin/Battleship Potemkin (1925) was critically acclaimed worldwide. It presents a dramatised version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against its officers. Mostly owing to this international renown, he was then able to direct Oktyabr': Desyat' dney kotorye potryasli mir/October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), as part of a grand tenth-anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. Then he directed Staroye i novoye/The General Line/Old and New (Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929), a celebration of the collectivisation of agriculture. In these films, Eisenstein did not use professional actors. His narratives eschewed individual characters and addressed broad social issues, especially class conflict. He used groups as characters, and the roles were filled with untrained people from the appropriate classes; he avoided casting stars. While critics outside Soviet Russia praised these works, Eisenstein's focus in the films on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him and like-minded directors such as Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko under fire from the Soviet film community. Though Eisenstein wanted to make films for the common man, his intense use of symbolism and metaphors in his 'intellectual montage' sometimes lost his audience. Though he made only seven films in his career, he and his theoretical writings demonstrated how the film could move beyond its nineteenth-century predecessor, the Victorian theatre, to create abstract concepts with concrete images. The attacks of the Soviet film community forced him to issue public articles of self-criticism and commitments to reform his cinematic visions to conform to the increasingly specific doctrines of socialist realism.
In the autumn of 1928, with October still under fire in many Soviet quarters, Sergei Eisenstein left the Soviet Union for a tour of Europe, accompanied by his perennial film collaborator Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. Officially, the trip was supposed to allow the three to learn about sound film and to present themselves as Soviet artists in-person to the capitalist West. For Eisenstein, however, it was an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zürich, London, and Paris. In Switzerland, Eisenstein supervised an educational documentary about abortion, Frauennot – Frauenglück/Women's Misery - Women's Happiness (Eduard Tissé, 1929). In late April 1930, film producer Jesse L. Lasky, on behalf of Paramount Pictures, offered Sergei Eisenstein the opportunity to make a film in the United States. Paramount proposed a film version of Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy'. Eisenstein completed a script but Paramount disliked it and, Paramount and Eisenstein annulled their contract. Charles Chaplin recommended that Eisenstein would meet with American socialist author Upton Sinclair. Sinclair's works were widely read in the USSR and were admired by Eisenstein. Sinclair secured permission for Eisenstein to travel to Mexico to make a film produced by Sinclair. Whilst in Mexico, he mixed socially with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. However, ¡Que viva México! met many problems and Sinclair shut down production before the film was finished. In 1978, Gregori Aleksandrov released his own version of ¡Que viva México!, which was awarded the Honorable Golden Prize at the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979. Eisenstein's foray into the West made the staunchly Stalinist film industry look upon him with a suspicion that would never completely disappear. He spent some time in a mental hospital in Kislovodsk in July 1933, ostensibly a result of depression born of his final acceptance that he would never be allowed to edit the Mexican footage. He was subsequently assigned a teaching position at the State Institute of Cinematography where he had taught earlier, and in 1933 and 1934 was in charge of writing the curriculum.
Finally, Sergei Eisenstein was able to ingratiate himself with Stalin for 'one more chance', and he chose, from two offerings, the assignment of a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, with music composed by Sergei Prokofiev. He was assigned a co-scenarist, Pyotr Pavlenko, to bring in a completed script; professional actors to play the roles including Nikolai Cherkasov in the title role, and an assistant director, Dmitri Vasilyev, to expedite shooting. The result, the historical drama Alexander Nevsky (1938) was critically well-received by both the Soviets and in the West and won him the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize. It depicts the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky (1220–1263). Eisenstein returned to teaching and was assigned to direct Richard Wagner's 'Die Walküre' at the Bolshoi Theatre. With the war approaching Moscow, Eisenstein was one of many filmmakers evacuated to Alma-Ata, where he first considered the idea of making a film about Tsar Ivan IV. Eisenstein corresponded with Prokofiev from Alma-Ata and was joined by him there in 1942. Prokofiev composed the score for Eisenstein's film epic Ivan Grozniy/Ivan the Terrible and Eisenstein reciprocated by designing sets for an operatic rendition of War and Peace that Prokofiev was developing. Eisenstein's film Ivan Grozniy/Ivan the Terrible, Part I, presenting Ivan IV of Russia as a national hero, won Stalin's approval and a Stalin Prize. The sequel, Ivan Grozniy/Ivan The Terrible, Part II, however, was criticised by various authorities and went unreleased until 1958. All footage from Ivan The Terrible, Part III was confiscated whilst the film was still incomplete, and most of it was destroyed, though several filmed scenes exist. In 1934, in the Soviet Union, Eisenstein married filmmaker and screenwriter Pera Atasheva. There have been debates about Eisenstein's sexuality, with a film covering Eisenstein's homosexuality allegedly running into difficulties in Russia. According to film critic Vitaly Vulf, the 10-years-long Eisenstein-Aleksandrov "friendship is still a subject of speculation and gossips, although there is no evidence they had had a sexual relationship". Eisenstein suffered a heart attack in 1946 and spent much of the following year recovering. He died of a second heart attack in 1948, at the age of 50. His body had lain in state in the Hall of the Cinema Workers before being cremated and his ashes were buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Sources: Michael Kaminsky (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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