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Italian postcard. Bromofoto, Milano. DEAR Film.

Romanian-born actress Nadia Gray (1923 – 1994) was an elegant and seductive star of European films of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Perhaps she is best known for her striptease scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).

French postcard. Photo Sam Lévin, no. 572.

French actor Paul Cambo (1908 – 1978) appeared during five decades in a total of 36 films.

French postcard by Editions du Globe, Paris, no. 375. Photo: Sam Lévin.

French stage actress Geneviève Kervine (1931 - 1989) appeared in some 30 films during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Although she was good-looking and chosen as most promising actress of 1955 in France, most of her films proved to be not very memorable.

British postcard in the Picturegoer series, London, no D 41. Photo: J. Arthur Rank Organisation Ltd.

Romanian-born actress Nadia Gray (1923 – 1994) was an elegant and seductive star of European films of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Perhaps she is best known for her striptease scene in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).

Nadia Gray (sometimes Nadja Grey) was born Nadia Kujnir-Herescu in Bucharest in 1923. She came from an old Jewish family. Her father was a Russian refugee and her mother was Bessarabian. As a child she was such an admirer of King Carol of Rumania that she threw down a bunch of flowers from her balcony on the royal cortege passing by. It was a time of anarchist terror and the incident caused her family some trouble. In 1946 she married the aristocrat Constantin Cantacuzino, a Romanian aviator and WWII fighter ace. They had met when she was a passenger on a commercial air flight at which he was the pilot. One of the engines had caught fire and Cantacuzino was forced to do an emergency landing. At the time, Gray had just started a career as a theatre actress. In 1947, the couple left Romania for Paris to escape the Communist regime after World War II. Her film debut was in the French-Austrian coproduction L'Inconnu d'un soir/Strangers on a night (1948, Hervé Bromberger) with Claude Dauphin. She played the leading role as a young waitress who yearns to be a star. Nadia enjoyed with her husband a cosmopolitan jet-set life and she also appeared on stage and in films. Early film roles that led to European stardom included her countess in Monseigneur/Monsignor (1949, Roger Richebe) opposite Bernard Blier, a woman in love with a master-safecracker (Guy Rolfe) in The Spider and the Fly (1949, Robert Hamer), and an opera diva in the Technicolor biopic Puccini (1953, Carmine Gallone) featuring Gabriele Ferzetti as the composer. Her English language films included the action-adventure Valley of Eagles (1951, Terence Young), the crime drama Night Without Stars (1951, Anthony Pelissier) opposite David Farrar, and the comedy The Captain's Table (1959, Jack Lee). Gray and her husband had eventually settled in Spain, but in 1958 Cantacuzino died.

Perhaps Nadia Gray’s best-known role was as the bored and decadent socialite Nadia in La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini) starring Marcello Mastroianni. In fact her part is only a cameo: toward the end of Fellini's masterpiece Nadia celebrates her divorce by performing a sensual mink-coated striptease during a wild party at her home. Gray specialized in aristocratic, jet-set roles. Among her scattered appearances in English-speaking productions were the comedy Mr. Topaze (1961, Peter Sellers) starring Peter Sellers, the Hammer horror thriller Maniac (1963, Michael Carreras) co-starring Kerwin Mathews, the thriller The Naked Runner (1967, Sidney J. Furie) starring Frank Sinatra, and a supporting role in the classic romance Two for the Road (1967, Stanley Donen) with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn. On TV Gray played a.o. Number 8 in The Chimes of Big Ben (1967), an episode of the cult series The Prisoner (1967-1968) starring Patrick McGoohan. She had acquired the French nationality in 1964, but in 1967 she married Manhattan attorney Herbert Silverman, and they settled in the USA. She retired from films completely in 1976 and began headlining as a nightclub singer. Nadia Gray died of a stroke in 1994 in New York City. She was 70 and was survived by her second husband and their two stepchildren.

Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Hal Erickson (Rovi), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Wikipedia (French, Italian, German and English) and IMDb.

French postcard by Editions O.P., Paris, no. 3 Photo: Teddy Piaz, Paris.

Character actor Raymond Aimos (1891 – 1944) or simply Aimos was one of the familiar faces of the French cinema of the 1930’s and early 1940’s. During this golden age of poetic realism, he was the quintessential 'titi parisien' (Parisian kid) in at least 105 films. His film characters generally corresponded with himself: humble, poor, colourful, cheeky but with a heart of gold.

Raymond Aimos was born as Raymond Arthur Coudurier in La Fère in the North of France in 1891 (1889 (sic) according to IMDb and other sources). He was the son of a watchmaker-jeweler and was expected to work in the family business but young Raymond was uncontrollably attracted to show business. He managed to become an opera singer under the stage name Aimos. According to urban legends, retold by different sources, he made his first film appearance as a kid either in the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arose/The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895, Louis Lumière) or in a film by another legendary film pioneer, Georges Méliès. (In the first film, the naughty boy was Benoît Duval). However, officially Aimos made his cinema debut in the short silent western Pendaison à Jefferson City/Hanging at Jefferson City (1910, Jean Durand) with Joë Hamman and Gaston Modot. He appeared in more early silent shorts, like the Onesime comedies Onésime et le nourrisson de la nourrice indigne/ Onesimus and the infant unworthy of the nurse (1912, Jean Durand), Onésime a un duel à l'américaine/Onesime has an American-style duel (1912, Jean Durand) and Onésime horloger/Onesime, Clockmaker (1912, Jean Durand), all starring Ernest Bourbon aka Onésime. A decade later, Aimos appeared in the Three Musketeers-sequel Vingt Ans après/Five Years Later (1922, Henri Diamant-Berger), based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas père. These film parts had all been modest, but Aimos’ lucky strike would be the coming of sound.

Aimos' physical appearance, his popular roots and mostly his gift of gab were in perfect harmony with the sound cinema of the 1930’s. He was wonderful as a humble man of the people in two masterpieces by René Clair, Sous les toits de Paris/Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) starring Albert Préjean, and Quatorze juillet/July 14 (1933) with Annabella. It lead to more work for important directors. He appeared for Raymond Bernard as a soldier in the war drama Les croix de bois/Wooden Crosses (1932) with Pierre Blanchar, and a clochard in Amants et voleurs/Lovers and Thieves (1935) with Arletty, for Sacha Guitry as another clochard in Ils étaient neuf célibataires/Nine Bachelors (1939), for Marcel Carné as Quart-Vittel, the wreck in Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (1938) , and for Jean Grémillon in Lumière d'été/Summer Light (1943) starring Madeleine Renaud. His most memorable roles were in the films by Julien Duvivier, such as Mulot, the legionary friend of Jean Gabin in La Bandera, and Tintin, one of the five friends who build a riverside café after winning the jackpot in the lottery in La Belle Équipe with Jean Gabin and Charles Vanel. He also appeared in Duvivier’s Paquebot Tenacity and L’homme du jour. At IMDb, Guy Bellinger writes: “But even when he worked for less distinctive directors his presence was an asset for the film.” Some of these films now belong to the highlights of the Poetic realism, a French genre of the 1930’s of lyrical, stylized and studio-bound films which offered a fatalistic view of life with their characters living on the margins of society, either as unemployed members of the working class or as criminals. Raymond Aimos was a courageous man in life. In August 1944, he decided to take part in the uprising against the Nazis which would lead to the Liberation of Paris. He was unfortunately hit by a stray bullet in the 10th Arrondissement. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear and undetermined He was only 53. Raymond Aimos never married and had no children. But he left an impressive film legacy, according to some sources he even appeared in nearly 450 films (IMDb only mentions 105 films)!

Sources: Simon Benattar-Bourgeay (Ciné-Artistes), Guy Bellinger (IMDb), Les Légendes du Cinéma (French), Wikipedia (French) and IMDb.