“Selznick was so good at guiding actors’ careers, making sure they were in the best pictures for them,” Osborne said. Osborne said Jourdan’s career suffered repeatedly from bad timing. “I was a star without one box-office hit,” he told Hedda Hopper in 1951. Selznick saw his work and signed him to a contract to make films in Hollywood, the first of which was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1947 “The Paradine Case,” with a stellar cast that included Gregory Peck, Charles Laughton and Ethel Barrymore.īut that movie was not considered one of the director’s best, and though Jourdan worked almost steadily, his early films in the U.S.

The film was not completed because of the approaching war, but around that time - possibly on the set of the film – photographer Raymond Voinquel took a sultry picture of a shirtless Jourdan that was published in a French magazine.ĭuring the German occupation of France, Jourdan and his family were involved in the resistance movement, according to several sources, and he worked as an actor in a few films, some of which didn’t make it into theaters until after the occupation. In 1939, Jourdan won his first film role in “Le Corsaire,” which starred Charles Boyer. His parents ran hotels in the South of France and as a young man he studied theater in Paris. Louis Jourdan was born Louis Gendre on June 19, 1921, in Marseille, France. “I think he’s right that he was stereotyped. “Audiences didn’t want to see him in that kind of role,” Osborne said in an interview with The Times. But at the time it came out, the film didn’t do Jourdan’s career much good.

Gigi wax