Louis Jourdan

From the Resistance to Hollywood Technicolor

Louis Gendre refused to work on Nazi propaganda productions during the occupation of France in 1940. That decision forced him into hiding and into the Resistance while his brothers were arrested by the Gestapo. At the end of the war, filmmaker David O. Selznick saw him at a press screening and decided that face was too valuable for Europe. He handed him a plane ticket and a contract.

In 1947 he made his Hollywood debut in The Paradine Case under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. The English director was not entirely convinced by the casting, but Selznick ran the set. The film was not the blockbuster everyone expected. But Louis Jourdan already had the European leading man label stuck to his forehead, and it would not come off for decades.

The industry never forgave the gesture.

Max Ophüls gave him the role that would define his elegance in 1948 in Letter from an Unknown Woman. In the film he played a seductive, amnesiac pianist who destroys the life of Joan Fontaine. That was when Jourdan realized his career would be a constant battle against the French Lover stereotype. He wanted dark, complex characters. But the studios only wanted him to smile and murmur in French.

The Success of Gigi and the Burden of Beauty

In 1958 Gigi arrived and the whole world fell at his feet. Vincente Minnelli's film swept the Oscars with nine statuettes and put him at the center of the global map. Jourdan hated the film's main song. He found it corny and empty. Despite his personal disdain, the success was so massive that his salary soared past 100,000 dollars per project in an era when that was a fortune.

And the gamble paid off.

Through the sixties and seventies he moved between European productions and television series in the United States. He appeared in The V.I.P.s in 1963 alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But his interest in film was waning amid the repetition of roles. He turned to the stage and to television projects such as Count Dracula in 1977, where he could explore a much darker side far removed from the Parisian ballrooms.

Tuxedoed Villains and Retirement in Beverly Hills

Tired of playing lovers, he decided to reinvent his image in the 1980s. In 1983 he agreed to play James Bond's nemesis in Octopussy. His take on Kamal Khan was a lesson in coldness and British manners filtered through a Marseille sensibility. He enjoyed playing despicable men far more than romantic heroes. Because villains always get the best lines.

He retired from film in 1992 after appearing in Year of the Comet.

He never returned to France to live. He stayed in his Beverly Hills home, surrounded by books and memories of an era that no longer existed. In 2010 the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor in a private ceremony in Los Angeles. It was his last major public honor before he died of natural causes in 2015. He was 93 years old and had more than 80 titles to his name.

He was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in California.