Mel Ferrer

The Strategist Behind the Gaze

Melchor Gastón Ferrer was born in New Jersey in 1917, but his identity was always a puzzle of Cuban and Irish roots. He was not the typical leading man waiting for a studio call while sitting on a velvet sofa. He left his studies at Princeton to try his luck in seedy theaters and ended up working as an editor for newspapers in Vermont before acting began to pay the bills.

In 1945, he made his Broadway debut in Strange Fruit, and it was no accident of fate. Ferrer sought out projects with a political edge. He did so because he saw film as a tool for dissecting society. His role in Lost Boundaries in 1949 put a spotlight on racism in the United States long before the industry felt comfortable tackling the subject.

He was a businessman trapped in an actor's body.

His lanky frame and intellectual air kept him away from tough-guy roles. But his intelligence let him move into directing and producing with a agility that irritated the studio executives of the day. In 1950, he directed The Secret Fury and proved he could place a camera as skillfully as any veteran of film noir.

The Long Shadow of a Producer

His meeting with Audrey Hepburn at a party hosted by Gregory Peck changed the course of his personal and professional life in 1954. They married that same year after sharing the stage in the play Ondine. The press of the time went after him, accusing him of controlling every step of his wife's career. But the technical reality was far more complex.

Ferrer was the architect behind several of Hepburn's biggest hits. He produced Wait Until Dark in 1967 and got her an Oscar nomination for the role of a blind woman, a part nobody wanted to finance. He invested his own money to push through projects that studios considered too risky.

And the gamble paid off.

In War and Peace in 1956, he played Prince Andrei Bolkonsky with a restraint few understood at the time. Over the years, however, that performance has come to be regarded as one of the most faithful to Tolstoy's text. His stint in Scaramouche in 1952 also left an important technical mark. The final fencing duel lasted nearly seven minutes of real footage, and Ferrer performed almost all of his scenes without stunt doubles.

The European Refuge and the End

When the Hollywood studio system began to collapse in the 1960s, he sought refuge in Europe. He spoke several languages fluently, which allowed him to work in France, Italy and Spain without forced dubbing. In 1965, he directed Marisol in the film Cabriola, because he wanted a visual style that blended classic musicals with European realism.

Prestige meant little to him as long as the contract was solid.

During the seventies and eighties, he turned to television and genre films that are now cult favorites. He appeared in the series Falcon Crest between 1981 and 1984, playing a lawyer who recalled his earlier characters at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He was a born survivor who knew that the entertainment business has no patience for nostalgia.

He spent his final years away from the spotlight at his California ranch. He was married five times and had six children. His last on-screen appearance was a small role in the TV movie Stories from My Childhood in 1998. He died of heart failure at his Santa Barbara estate on June 2, 2008, at the age of 90.