Lise Bourdin, one of the most recognizable French models of the 1940s and 1950s, who later turned to cinema, has died at 99.
Her family told AFP that she died on Friday at her home in Labastide-d’Armagnac, just two days before her birthday.
With her brown hair and dazzling blue eyes, Bourdin became a favorite of major European magazines before launching into cinema.
She shared the screen with stars such as Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier in Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957), where she played one of the many women attracted to Cooper’s American playboy.
Bourdin also appeared opposite Sophia Loren in The River Girl (1954), Linda Darnell and Vittorio De Sica in It Happens in Rome (1955), and Eddie Constantine in Dishonorable Discharge (1957), depicting a fashion editor under extreme pressure.
Born on November 30, 1925 in Néris-les-Bains, she entered modeling by chance. A man who spotted her at a train station introduced her to a photographer.
“I made an appointment with [a photographer] and the cover was published immediately,” she said in a 2017 interview. She quickly did the covers of Marie-Claire, Noir et Blanc and Harper’s Bazaar.
Life review in 1946, it introduced her as a “young girl with a fresh country look”, calling her a “Parisian sensation”. Looking back on it years later, she noted: “Few French women have had two pages in La Vie. [Brigitte] bardot, [Jeanne] Moreau and me.
Her film career began with Les Enfants de l’amour (1953), and by Cannes 1954, she was making headlines, even being seen out on the town with Robert Mitchum.
After two final releases in 1959, she gave up acting. “The press didn’t like me…I told myself I would never have the career I deserved, so I quit.”
Bourdin was married once, briefly, and then spent 30 years with Raymond Marcellin, a former French interior minister, until his death in 2004.
