The romantic case of actor Charles Boyer

His wife was beautiful, but I don't think Boyer was merely straight!

His is my favorite celebrity appearance on "I Love Lucy".

In the era of the douche-bro any male with poise, polish and decent manners is read as effeminate/gay.

The end of his marriage and of his life seems to come right out of one his movies.

His character in Gaslight was largely a two dimensional mustache twirling villain - but mane was he effective in that role.

The French have a romantic relationship with death that lasts all through life until death comes to take them home.

Boyer was nominated 4 times for an Academy Award (Conquest, 1937; Algiers, 1938; Gaslight, 1944; Fanny, 1961) but only received an Honorary Oscar for establishing the French Research Foundation, which is now at UCLA:

"Holdings on literature were significantly expanded in 1970 with the gift of the late actor Charles Boyer's library, previously known as the French Research Foundation. The approximately ten thousand volumes in this collection included a 1771 edition of Diderot's Encyclopedie and complete or long runs of several major French literary and satiric journals as well as carefully assembled ephemera: posters, press clippings, and other materials."

He's my ideal man: cultured, literate, liberal, devoted, romantic, handsome. Do such men still exist?

Actually, it is rare for an actor to be married to the same woman for many years and until the end of their lives. I don't think it has to do with him being French. We know many French actors and actresses whose marriages didn't last.

R6, you mean such 'people' still exist? Women are more, or little like men. They are not angels.

*more or less

I don't imply that Boyer was an angel, but the fact that he stayed with the same person for so many years, until the end, says a lot. Every day, there are many temptations, especially when your profession is acting in movies. As a matter of fact, it's easy to step out of a marriage, when you are an actor/actress.

Some people find partners they are truly happy with and value above anything else. It happens. So lucky.

I wonder if nympho Ingrid Bergman made a pass on him, while they were filming 'Gaslight', R3.

I am thinking she might have been more likely to have a fling with Joseph Cotton during that film.

Joseph was also married back then. Certainly, Ingrid must have tried to seduce, either Boyer, or Cotten, because they were both married at the time, and she had a thing about married men...

Boyer was described by friends as a “happily married book-worm and a stick in the mud.”

Boyer was a homebody. It was his wife who had the fabulous dinner parties. He was bald , short and had a paunch but he was great to work with and directors loved him. He had great toupees. He was very faithful to his wife.

Louis Jordan was much the same. Both French guys who were faithful homebodies who loved their families

Charles Boyer's son died while playing Russian Roulette.

Boyer is very good in "A Woman's Vengeance" (1948), in which he plays a man whose invalid wife dies, and he suddenly marries his much younger girlfriend, Ann Blyth, angering the woman next door, Jessica Tandy, who had expected him to marry her. Lovely moments, particularly a scene near the end wherein Boyer describes his acceptance of the inevitability of death. Gorgeous music score by Miklos Rozsa, with a heartrending string solo theme.

I saw two of his films quite recently and he was wonderful in each. John M. Stahl's WHEN TOMORROW COMES (1939), which is a lovely film, and the truly great HOLD BACK THE DAWN (1941) by Mitchell Leisen.

He was lovely and warm in "Fannie" as a Marseille barkeeper.

Now that you are talking about his movies, he also played in The Cobweb', one of my favorite films. Only Bacall didn't fit in this movie. Don't take me wrong, Bacall was a good actress, but this role didn't become her. On the other hand, Gloria Grahame was FABULOUS and so was...Lillian Gish! All the other actors were also effective in their roles, let alone Charles Boyer.

For those who speak French this is an excellent TV program from 1989 where French actors talk about working in Hollywood. Tyrone Powers' wife Annabella is quite interesting. Capucine seems to have been in a manic phase this evening. Much interesting info re the French in Hollywood.

Charles Boyer is mentioned as one of the few French actors who remained in the USA.

Handsome man, indeed.

Onscreen, Boyer was a handsome international playboy type. Offscreen, as already mentioned, he was a short and paunchy homebody, who wore lifts and girdles to slim down and straighten his posture, and toupees to hide his receding hairline. On the first day of ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO, Bette Davis failed to recognize him out of costume and tried to have him removed from the set.

Somebody had mentioned Louis Jourdan. Like Boyer, Jourdan also lost his only son, Louis, who swallowed a whole bottle of pills at the age of 29.

r4 Perhaps that's the reason the French refer to an orgasm as 'Le Petit Mort'?

Wow, this correlation is chilling R22. Very interesting. So was your trivia about Bette!

Hmmm R23....you made an excellent point.

You beautifully dressed this thread with your remarks, all of you guys.

As you did with the previous Charles Boyer thread.

He was also handsome, when he got older.

He was a most unlikely sex symbol, being a small, unimposing man who wasn't classically handsome and who obviously wasn't a man of action. He was the opposite of the ideal of masculinity of his era, the gruff, butch Clark Gables and John Waynes.

Yet women of the 1930s and 1940s ADORED him. Partly because of a magnificent voice that made the cheesiest dialogue sound deliciously elegant, and partly because IMHO so many women were absolutely dying for a little sophistication in their lives. Really, life was less than fun for non-wealthy women during those years.

They all are buried near Sharon Tate and beside Zazu Pitts.

I was going to post that French wives of that era were very tolerant of husbands having affairs, but Pat Boyer wasn't French - she was from Yorkshire.

Who knows if he was completely faithful. If he wasn't at least he was discreet, which is better behavior than most of his Hollywood peers managed.

He played loyal and faithful so well, even managed to make it seem interesting. He made undying love sexy, and it seems like that's because he lived it offscreen.

As a little kid I saw many cartoons in which he was parodied as a silly French lover spouting the line "Come wiz me to thee Casbah!" which was from his film Algiers with Hedy Lamarr. I think his character in Algiers was called Pepe Le Moko and the cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew must have been based on him as well.

In an interview, Bette Davis once named Boyer as one of the sexiest of her leading men, particularly his eyes.

In Hollywood films, Charles Boyer, and later, Louis Jourdan, epitomized the quintessential French lover, sophisticated, urbane, romantic, world-weary and sometimes fatalistic lovers. The irony is both Boyer and Jourdan were from the South of France (Figeac and Marseille respectively), an entirely different culture from that of Paris, and one that snooty Parisians dismiss as rowdy, unsophisticated, and provincial.

R16 I want to see that movie!

She was his lobster

Fanny (1961), which also features the breathtakingly beautiful (and bisexual) Horst Buchholz, is coming out on blu-ray in September.

Any pics of his son? Was he ugly and couldn't live up to his dad's image?

Dad said Boyer had one of those marriages where the parents were all wrapped up with each other, and while they loved the kid very much, he may have felt like an outsider.

R38, Michael Charles Boyer, 22

r29, Zasu Pitts. Her mother had 2 sisters: Eliza and Susan. She combined parts of both names to come up with Zasu. She was arguably the most scene stealing actor ever to be filmed.

Per R40's link, the son shot himself while playing Russian Roulette. Is that the same as committing suicide?

It says he was playing Russian Roulette while depressed over the end of a relationship; sounds like suicide to me.

While he fit the continental debonair for Hollywood, in his native tongue he was dynamic, the lengths he would go were elusive and complex. Or maybe it was just Ophuls.

Awfully sad about his wife's death and then his own. I never knew this about them.

He and Mildred Natwick were more interesting than Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in "Barefoot in the Park." Funnier too.

I agree about his guest shot on "I Love Lucy." He was charming and very funny. I loved him imitating Lucy's idea of what he sounded like.

Jeanine Basinger's book "The Star Machine" has a very interesting chapter devoted to Boyer (and William Powell).

She discusses the "Lucy" episode to illustrate his versatility and self- awareness of his popular image.

I like him in "The April Fools" too.

He had elegance.

If you ain't got elegance

You can never ever carry it off

"The Earring of Madame de..." is on TCM with Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux, who turned 99 last month. Amazing.

Watching it now. Wow! She's still alive

On the "Gaslight" set, it was all about Boyer and Dame May Whitty.

Who needs Boyer?!

I'm confused by the OP: how could his wife not be told she had cancer? The doctors surely didn't tell only her husband, and not her. Doesn't make sense.