Maurice Auguste Chevalier was a French singer, actor, and entertainer. He is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including "Livin' In The Sunlight", "Valentine", "Louise", "Mimi", and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", and for his films, including The Love Parade, The Big Pond, The Smiling Lieutenant, One Hour with You, and Love Me Tonight. His trademark attire was a boater hat and tuxedo.
The Love Parade is a 1929 American pre-Code musical comedy film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, involving the marital difficulties of Queen Louise of Sylvania (MacDonald) and her consort, Count Alfred Renard (Chevalier). Despite his love for Louise and his promise to be an obedient husband, Count Alfred finds his role as a figurehead unbearable. The supporting cast features Lupino Lane, Lillian Roth and Eugene Pallette.
Frances Marion Dee was an American actress. Her first film was the musical Playboy of Paris (1930). She starred in the film An American Tragedy (1931). She is also known for starring in the 1943 Val Lewton psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie.
Yvonne Printemps was a French singer and actress who achieved stardom on stage and screen in France and internationally.
Gigi is a 1958 American musical romantic comedy film directed by Vincente Minnelli and processed using Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Eastmancolor film process Metrocolor. The screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner is based on the 1944 novella of the same name by Colette. The film features songs with lyrics by Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, arranged and conducted by André Previn. Costume design was done by Cecil Beaton.
Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier. The screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond is based on the 1920 Claude Anet novel Ariane, jeune fille russe. The story explores the relationship between a notorious middle-aged American playboy business magnate and the 20-something daughter of a private detective hired to investigate him. The supporting cast features John McGiver and Lise Bourdin.
Can-Can is a 1960 American musical film made by Suffolk-Cummings productions and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was directed by Walter Lang, produced by Jack Cummings and Saul Chaplin. The screenplay was written by Dorothy Kingsley and Charles Lederer, loosely based on the musical play by Abe Burrows. The music and lyrics were written by Cole Porter for the play, but for the film, some songs were replaced by those from earlier Porter musicals. Art direction was handled by Jack Martin Smith and Lyle R. Wheeler, costume design by Irene Sharaff and dance staging by Hermes Pan. The film was photographed in Todd-AO. Although performing well on initial release, it failed to recoup its production costs from its domestic receipts.
Albert Willemetz was a French librettist.
Yvonne Vallée was a French actress.
The Merry Widow is a 1934 film adaptation of the 1905 operetta of the same name by Franz Lehár. The film was directed and produced by Ernst Lubitsch starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald with a supporting cast featuring Edward Everett Horton, Una Merkel, Sterling Holloway, Donald Meek, Jason Robards Sr. and Akim Tamiroff. A French-language version was produced at the same time and released in France the same year as La Veuve joyeuse with some but not all of the same cast. Lorenz Hart and Gus Kahn wrote new English lyrics for some Lehar songs under the musical direction of Herbert Stothart.
Paramount on Parade is a 1930 all-star American pre-Code revue released by Paramount Pictures, directed by several directors including Edmund Goulding, Dorothy Arzner, Ernst Lubitsch, Rowland V. Lee, A. Edward Sutherland, Lothar Mendes, Otto Brower, Edwin H. Knopf, Frank Tuttle, and Victor Schertzinger—all supervised by the production supervisor, singer, actress, and songwriter Elsie Janis.
Oliver Peters Heggie, billed as O. P. Heggie, was an Australian film and theatre actor best known for portraying the hermit who befriends the Monster in the film Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He was born Otto Peters Heggie at Angaston, South Australia to a local pastoralist. He was educated at Whinham College and the Adelaide Conservatoire of Music. He died in Los Angeles of pneumonia. He is buried at Woodside Cemetery, Yarmouth Port, Barnstable County, Massachusetts.
The Little Cafe is a 1919 French silent comedy film directed by Raymond Bernard and starring Max Linder, Armand Bernard and Joffre. It was based on the 1911 play The Little Cafe by Tristan Bernard.
The Little Cafe is a French comedy play written by Tristan Bernard which was first performed in 1911. An English-language musical version The Little Cafe was successfully staged in the United States in 1913.
Le petit café is a 1931 French-language American Pre-Code musical film directed by Ludwig Berger and starring Maurice Chevalier, Yvonne Vallée and Tania Fédor. The film is a foreign-language version of the 1930 film Playboy of Paris, which was based on the play The Little Cafe by Tristan Bernard. Multiple-language versions were common in the years following the introduction of sound film, before the practice of dubbing became widespread. It was shot at the Joinville Studios in Paris.
Maurice Yvain was a French composer noted for his operettas of the 1920s and 1930s. Some of which were written for Mistinguett, at one time the best-paid female entertainer in the world. In the 1930s and 1940s, he became a major success in the United States and several of his pieces appeared in the famous Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. He also composed music for several films of notable directors such as Anatole Litvak, Julien Duvivier, and Henri-Georges Clouzot. Yvain's music blended with the then "spirit of Paris".
Folies Bergère de Paris is a 1935 American musical comedy film produced by Darryl Zanuck for 20th Century Films, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Maurice Chevalier, Merle Oberon and Ann Southern. At the 8th Academy Awards, the “Straw Hat” number, choreographed by Dave Gould, won the short-lived Academy Award for Best Dance Direction, sharing the honor with “I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin'” from Broadway Melody of 1936. The film, based on the 1934 play The Red Cat by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler, is a story of mistaken identity, with Maurice Chevalier playing both a music-hall star and a business tycoon who resembles him. This was Chevalier’s last film in Hollywood for twenty years, and reprised familiar themes such as the straw hat and a rendering of the French song "Valentine". This is also the last film to be distributed by Twentieth Century Pictures before it merged with Fox Film in 1935 to form 20th Century Fox.
Chasing Yesterday is a 1935 American historical drama film directed by George Nicholls Jr. using a screenplay by Francis Edward Faragoh, adapted from the 1881 novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, by Anatole France. Released on May 3, 1935, the film stars Anne Shirley, O. P. Heggie, and Helen Westley.
The Années folles was the decade of the 1920s in France. It was coined to describe the social, artistic, and cultural collaborations of the period. The same period is also referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age in the United States. In Germany, it is sometimes referred to as the Golden Twenties because of the economic boom that followed World War I.
"Valentine" is a song by French actor, cabaret singer and entertainer Maurice Chevalier. Its first public performance was in 1925. The song was strongly associated with him, and his imitators use it as "an instant identification symbol". Chevalier performed the song, in French, in two American movies, Innocents of Paris (1928) and Folies Bergère de Paris (1935), but to not offend American sensibilities the word tétons ('breasts') was replaced with a mysterious piton, which translates as 'peg' or 'protuberance'. Piton was needed for the rhyme scheme, but Chevalier always pointed to his nose at that moment in the song, to indicate what part of his lover's anatomy he was supposedly fondling.
