Charles Boyer

Biography: life and films

Charles Boyer was a French film actor. He was born in Figeac, France on 28 August 1899 and died in Phoenix, Arizona, USA on 26 August 1978. Boyer had not long embarked on a promising stage career when he was lured towards the new medium of cinema. He made his film debut in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Homme du large (1920) and was soon playing dashing juvenile roles in such films as Alberto Cavalcanti's Le Capitaine Fracasse (1929) and Anatole Litvak's Mayerling (1936). With his striking good looks and seductive charms, Boyer was a natural matinee idol in the classic American mould, and it is hardly surprising that he should end up working in Hollywood early into his film career. Here, he frequently starred opposite some of the most iconic of actresses, including Greta Garbo in Conquest (1937), Bette Davis in All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Irene Dunne in Love Affair (1939) and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944).

In 1942, Boyer was granted American citizenship but returned to France in the early 1950s as his Hollywood career began to wane. Although he did appear in a few quality productions thereafter, notably Max Ophüls' Madame de... (1953), more frequently he lent his talents to such lowbrow fare as Michel Boisrond's Une parisienne (1957). One film to make good use of his flair for comedy was Gene Saks' Barefoot in the Park (1967), in which he succeeded in out-staging (and out-classing) Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. In his penultimate film, Alain Resnais's Stavisky (1974), Boyer attracted considerable critical acclaim for a performance that won him the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1974 (tying with Jack Nicholson for The Last Detail).

In the course of a remarkable screen career that spanned 56 years, Charles Boyer appeared in more than eighty films. He was nominated for four Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award in 1943 for his part in establishing the French Research Foundation in Los Angeles. In 1948, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. Successful as he was, Boyer's personal life was marked by immense tragedy. In 1965, his only son Michael committed suicide at the age of 21, and in August 1978 his wife Pat Paterson died from an inoperable brain tumour. A few days after his wife's death, and two days before his 79th birthday, Boyer killed himself by taking a lethal dose of barbiturates. He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Filmography

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