Lise Bourdin, a leading French model in the 1940s and ’50s who turned to acting and appeared with Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier in Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, has died. She was 99.
Bourdin died Friday — two days before her birthday — at her home in Labastide-d’Armagnac, France, relatives told the AFP news service.
The brown-haired, blue-eyed Bourdin also co-starred with Sophia Loren in The River Girl (1954), with Linda Darnell and Vittorio De Sica in It Happens in Roma (1955) and, as a pressured fashion magazine editor who suffers a breakdown, with Eddie Constantine in Dishonorable Discharge (1957).
In the Paris-set romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon (1957), written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond in the first of their 12 screenplay collaborations, Bourdin portrayed one of the many girlfriends of American playboy Frank Flannigan (Cooper).
The film, released by Allied Artists in the U.S., was a flop in America — perhaps moviegoers didn’t buy into the romance between Hepburn and the much-older Cooper — but a big hit in Europe, where it went by the titleAriane (the name of Hepburn’s character).
Born on Nov. 30, 1925, in Néris-les-Bains, Allier, France, Bourdin started out as a model after she met the brother of the owner of Claudine magazine; he saw her at a train station in Paris and followed her.
“I made an appointment with [a photographer] and the cover was published immediately,” she recalled in a 2017 interview.
Soon, she was fronting such other magazines as Marie-Claire, Noir et Blanc and Harper’s Bazaar and featured in Life in July 1946, with that weekly calling her a “youngster with a fresh country look” and a “Paris sensation.”
“Few French women have had two pages in Life. There was [Brigitte] Bardot, [Jeanne] Moreau and me,” she noted. In 1948 during a visit to New York, she was heralded as the most photographed girl in France.
Bourdin had her first notable film role in Les Enfants de l’amour (1953), directed by Léonide Moguy, and at the seventh annual Cannes Film Festival in 1954, she was seen around town with Robert Mitchum.
She ended her brief acting career after appearing in two films released in 1959, Quai des illusions, toplined by Gaby Morlay, and The Last Blitzkrieg, featuring Van Johnson, Dick York and Larry Storch.
“The press didn’t like me, and I had a private life outside the artistic world,” she said. “I told myself that I would never have the career I deserved, so I stopped.”
She was married only once, very briefly to Brazilian industrialist Roberto Seabra, and then had a 30-year relationship with Raymond Marcellin, onetime Interior Minister of France, before his death in 2004.