by Stephen Vagg
(Warning: The following article contains discussion of suicide)
Capucine had no business being a good actor. She was a fashion model, whose producer boyfriend forced directors to put her in their movies, prompting cast members to quit. She was thrust into leading roles before a proper apprenticeship, English wasn’t her first language, and she started relatively late, and critics constantly gave her a hard time. But she was great. Mostly.
She was born Germaine Lefebvre in the south of France in 1928, taking the name “Capucine”, after being spotted in her late teens by a commercial photographer, who encouraged her to become a model. Capucine was very tall and beautiful, with an elegant, slender (ie. quasi-anorexic) look that was in fashion at the time, as popularised by Audrey Hepburn (who was a great friend of Capucine’s incidentally). She appeared in some French films such as Frou Frou (1955) and was briefly married to actor Pierre Trabaud, but it’s unlikely that anyone in English-speaking countries would have heard of her had not she been spotted by producer Charles Feldman in the late 1950s.
Feldman isn’t remembered much these days, but he was once legendary, a Hollywood agent who helped pioneer the practice of “packaging” films – namely, getting together stars, director and a “property” (a script/book/play/whatever) and presenting them to studios as a package. This became increasingly common with the decline of the studio system after World War Two, and Feldman eventually moved into producing himself, his credits including such films as Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and The Seven Year Itch (1955).
Feldman fell head over heels for Capucine, made her his mistress, arranged for acting and English lessons, and determined to turn her into a star. He was perhaps inspired/emboldened by Darryl F. Zanuck’s attempts throughout the 1950s to turn his mistresses Bella Darvi and then Juliette Greco into stars (Zanuck would keep trying through 1960s with Irinia Demick and Genevieve Gilles); Carlo Ponti was doing something similar with Sophia Loren, Franco Cristaldi with Claudia Cardinale, Dino De Laurentiis with Silvana Mangano, Roger Vadim with Brigitte Bardot, Federico Fellini with Giulietta Masina, Ingmar Bergman with Harriet Andersson and Bibi Andersson, Jean Cocteau with Jean Marias, and so on. Some of these couples formalised their relationship via marriage; that never happened between Feldman and Capucine although the two remained close until Feldman’s death in 1968.
Feldman tried to get Howard Hawks, one of his clients, to cast Capucine as Feathers in Rio Bravo (1959) – Hawks had a fondness for discovering and “moulding” young talent (Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, and a lot of ones that didn’t work out who no one remembers). Capucine didn’t get the gig – Angie Dickinson did – but she made her debut not long after in Song Without End (1960) a biopic of composer Franz Liszt (Dirk Bogarde), best remembered for (a) being Bogarde’s first movie shot in Hollywood and (b) the fact that its director Charles Vidor died during filming, and was replaced by George Cukor. To be honest, Capucine’s not very good in a poor movie (which flopped) and Bogarde isn’t much better. However, they became lifelong friends out of the experience; Bogarde wrote a whole chapter about her in one of his memoirs, Cleared for Take-off, claiming that he fell in love with her during the shoot (despite having been living with Tony Forwood since 1949), but her heart lay with Feldman.
Feldman insisted Capucine be in another film that the producer was packaging with one of his clients, John Wayne: this was North to Alaska (1960), a comic riff on The Spoilers, where Capucine played a prostitute who falls for Alaskan gold miner Wayne. Richard Fleischer was meant to direct but disliked the script and Capucine, later writing, “Her English, like her experience, was minimal. In fact, she hardly spoke at all. I felt that in her case still waters ran shallow. Although she was beautiful, there was no spark of personality to back it up. I wondered how this bland, rather shy beauty was going to portray a spirited prostitute in an Alaskan whorehouse opposite John Wayne.” Fleischer left the project, replaced by Henry Hathaway, and the world prepared to mock Capucine… but the resulting film was terrific fun and a big hit. What’s more, Capucine was wonderful in the final movie – perfectly cast, elegant, beautiful, lovely, believably falling in love with Wayne (the first third of the film, their courtship in Seattle, is the best bit of the movie) and later very fun being pursued by Wayne, Stewart Granger and Fabian, and then taking part in the brawl at the end. This is important too because the movie is her character’s story as much as Wayne’s – she drives the whole second half. According to contemporary reviews, however, she didn’t get much credit for the movie’s success.
Capucine went to Europe to appear in The Triumph of Michel Stroganoff (1961), then Feldman assembled another vehicle for her: Walk on the Wild Side (1962) playing another prostitute, this time pursued by Laurence Harvey and also Barbara Stanwyck (in a pioneering onscreen depiction of a lesbian). The film was plagued with production troubles, including an ever-evolving script (which you can tell from the final result), director Edward Dmytryk struggling to control the set, and bad behaviour from Harvey, in part due to clashes with co-star Jane Fonda but also his unhappiness with Capucine. Co-star Anne Baxter said Harvey told Capucine that she “couldn’t act and walked off the set. She wept for a week.” Harvey told the press “Capucine is a ghastly woman. It’s not her fault she can’t act.” One would’ve thought Harvey might be more understanding considering he owed a great deal of his career success to being the lover of a powerful producer himself (James Woolf). Walk on the Wild Side has splendid music and credits, and isn’t as bad as we’d been led to believe, though it is a mess. Capucine is very good (even if it doesn’t make sense that her character is so self-sacrificing) in the movie, by the way, much better than in Song Without End but if we’re honest, she’s a little dull (this was to be a recurring feature of her dramatic performances).
Feldman put Capucine in The Lion (1962) with William Holden, only to see her start shagging Holden during the shoot, despite Holden being married, which we guess is one of the dangers of trying to turn your mistress into a movie star. Like Walk on a Wild Side, this film is also a mess – what should be a children’s story, about a girl and her lion, is turned into a dull marital drama where the really interesting story (woman leaves dull husband to run off with big game hunter) is backstory and we’re meant to be happy at the end about a kid being dragged away from exciting Africa to boring old America. It flopped. Incidentally, the other star in the film was Trevor Howard – imagine the boozing that went on during that production, with him and Holden running around Africa…
Then came The Pink Panther (1963). Originally, Peter Ustinov and Ava Gardner were meant to play Inspector Clouseau and his wife, but Gardner pulled out at the last minute, and Blake Edwards cast Capucine – which in turn spooked Peter Ustinov, who dropped out as well; in scrambling around for replacements, Edwards came up with Peter Sellers and cinematic history was made. So, there you go: no Capucine, no Sellers, and The Pink Panther doesn’t become the monster franchise. The irony is, Capucine’s actually wonderful in the movie, as the two-(or is it three-) timing wife, assuring Sellers she loves him while running off for nookie with David Niven and flirting with Robert Wagner. As with North to Alaska, while the film was a huge success, she got little credit for it.
Feldman didn’t seem to hold a grudge about the Capucine-Holden affair and organised another movie featuring the two of them: The Seventh Dawn (1964), a drama about the Malayan Emergency (based on a novel by an Australian journalist, incidentally). Director Lewis Gilbert claimed Feldman had the script rewritten to increase Capucine’s part, with everyone saying that she was miscast as a Eurasian fighting for Malayan independence (well, yes, but also the very Japanese Tetsuro Tanba plays a Chinese Communist). No one much liked the movie when it came out (Holden was on a cold streak through the 1960s until broken by The Wild Bunch), though it has historical interest. Capucine is fine, though you can kind of tell that Gilbert is far more interested in the Holden-Susannah York storyline than the Holden-Capucine one.
Apparently, Holden and Feldman tried to get Capucine cast as the main love interest in Holden’s next scheduled movie, The Americanization of Emily (1964) but the producer, Martin Ransohoff, refused, insisting on Julie Andrews; this resulted in Holden leaving the movie and being replaced by James Garner. Holden and Capucine eventually broke up, but he remembered her fondly – she had done her best to keep him sober – and he left her some money in his will (incidentally, he bled to death in 1981 after having hit his head while drunk; his body was not discovered for four days – don’t drink alone kids!).
Feldman kept faith in Capucine. He owned the rights to a stage play about a compulsive Don Juan figure – Lot’s Wife, by the Czech writer Ladislaus Bus-Fekete – hoping to turn it into a vehicle for Cary Grant and Capucine (North to Alaska had also been based on a European play). Dissatisfied with several drafts and unable to get Grant’s interest, he changed the star to Warren Beatty and had a script written by a new stand up comic called Woody Allen, and it became What’s New, Pussycat? Then Beatty and Feldman had a series of disagreements, mostly about the size of Beatty’s role but also Feldman’s insistence on Capucine’s casting, which led to Beatty dropping out and being replaced by Peter O’Toole. The resulting movie was a big hit, which stung Beatty so much that he decided to move into producing which led to Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Once more, Capucine is terrific, holding her own against brilliant comics including Peter Sellers, and once more she got little credit. But there you go again – no Capucine, no What’s New Pussycat?, no Woody Allen the screenwriter, no Bonnie and Clyde.
For some reason Capucine wasn’t in Feldman’s version of Casino Royale (1967), even though everyone else was, it seemed. She was in a segment of a European anthology comedy, The Queens (1966) alongside Claudia Cardinale, then Feldman used her again in The Honey Pot (1967), one of Joseph L Mankiewicz’s worst films; Mankiewicz was normally strong with female characters but with the exception of Maggie Smith, all the ones in The Honey Pot are poor (and Cliff Robertson is disastrously miscast). When Mankiewicz apologists demand to see the five-hour version of Cleopatra (1963), ask them to justify The Honey Pot (in fairness, Mankiewicz was struggling at the time to shake off the drug habit he’d developed to get through the Cleopatra shoot).
Feldman died in 1968, leaving Capucine the rights to the novel The Stranger in his will (among other things). Presumably, he had intended to turn the book into a movie vehicle for her – it’s about a mail order bride in the old West – but it is doubtful whether anyone was interested in making it without Feldman to push it, so she sold the rights and it was turned into Zandy’s Bride (1974), with Gene Hackman and Liv Ullman in the Capucine role. Capucine played a series of sexually fluid roles which contributed to her status as a queer icon: The Exquisite Cadaver (1969), a really stylish thriller for director Vicente Aranda; Fraulein Dokter (1969) with Suzy Kendall; and Fellini’s Satyricon (1969).
She managed to keep working but the parts became smaller and smaller; no doubt the death of Feldman accentuated this, but ageism would have also been a factor. There were some interesting credits like Red Sun (1971) (as a hooker once again), The Con Artists (1976), From Hell to Victory (1977) and Arabian Adventure (1979). Bogarde tried to get her cast in Death in Venice (1971), but Visconti disapproved, claiming (according to Bogarde) that she looked too much like a horse. Capucine reprised her role as Clouseau’s wife in The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) (married to David Niven, which is sweet) and The Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) aka Ted Wass’ moment in the sun. (She wasn’t used in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) though). She guest starred on shows like Hart to Hart (Robert Wagner had remained a friend) and Murder She Wrote.
Her later years were plagued by illness and depression, and she became increasingly reclusive. Wagner says that she was a manic depressive, who tried to take her own life several times, once being saved by Audrey Hepburn. Eventually, in 1990, she threw herself off the top of the apartment complex where she was living.
Could Capucine have been a bigger star? Well, she didn’t do too badly – she became world famous, appeared in three big hits (North to Alaska, Pink Panther, What’s Up Pussycat) and a bunch of widely seen movies. Wagner later wrote, “For whatever reason, the public never quite took to her. Perhaps she was a little too aristocratic in her looks, or the delightful aspects of her personality never quite came across on film.” All due respect to Mr Wagner, we would argue that it did come across, in her comedies, if not her dramas. The fact is, French-accented stars rarely become big names in Hollywood: Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier did well, but most go scurrying back to Europe eg Sophie Marceau, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Michele Morgan, Jean Gabin. Also, Capucine was easy to mock because of Feldman and her debut in Song Without End – she was disparaged in the press by Laurence Harvey, while Richard Fleischer, Warren Beatty and Peter Ustinov all publicly walked off movies to avoid working with her. That’s got to hurt. So too did the fact that she lacked a classy drama credit to ensure critical plaudits, in contrast with her contemporaries such as Claudia Cardinale (who had The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers), Sophia Loren (Two Women), Jeanne Moreau (La Notte, Jules et Jim), Anouk Aimée (A Man and a Woman) and Catherine Deneuve (Repulsion). She also had a knack of working under A list directors having off days (George Cukor, Edward Dmytryk, Lewis Gilbert, Joseph Mankiewicz).
It’s a great shame that she didn’t work again with Dirk Bogarde, John Wayne, Blake Edwards, Woody Allen or Peter Sellers – especially Sellers, who bounced brilliantly off her, and Wayne, who increasingly struggled to find age appropriate co-stars as the years went on (Capucine would have slotted very well into the world of, say, Hatari, Circus World, Donovan’s Reef, The Green Berets, Hellfighters, etc).
But overall, her record was clearly in the profit column. In addition to her impact on Feldman – if not for Capucine, then it is unlikely Feldman tries to make North to Alaska, Walk on the Wild Side, The Lion, The Seventh Dawn, and What’s New Pussycat? – she left behind some wonderful performances. She deserved and deserves more respect.
