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Arletty
Born	Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat 15 May 1898(1898-05-15) Courbevoie, France
Died	24 July 1992 (aged 94) Paris, France
Years active	1930–1963

Arletty (15 May 1898 – 24 July 1992) was a French fashion model, singer, and actress.

Biography

Arletty was born Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat in Courbevoie (near Paris), to a working-class family. Her early career was dominated by the music hall, and she later appeared in plays and cabaret. Arletty was a stage performer for ten years before her film debut in 1930. Arletty’s career took off around 1936 when she appeared as leading lady in the stage plays Les Joies du Capitole and Fric-Frac, in which she starred opposite Michel Simon.

In 1945, Arletty appeared in her most famous film role, the central part of Garance in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis, her fourth role for the director. Arletty was imprisoned in 1945 for having had a wartime liaison with a German officer during the occupation of France. She allegedly later commented on the experience, "My heart is French but my ass is international."^[1] After a moderately successful period as a stage actor in later life, an accident in 1963 left her nearly blind, forcing her to retire. One of her final screen appearances was in a small role as an elderly French woman in the 1962 epic The Longest Day.

On her passing in 1992, Arletty was cremated, her ashes interred in her hometown at the Nouveau Cimetière de Courbevoie.

Legacy

• In 1995 the government of France issued a series of limited edition coins to commemorate the centenary of film that included a 100 Franc coin bearing the image of Arletty.

Selected filmography

• Un chien qui rapporte (1932)
• Hôtel du Nord (1938)
• Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939)
• Les Visiteurs du soir (1942)
• Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945)
• Huis-clos (No Exit, 1954)
• L'Air de Paris (1954)
• Le Grand Jeu (1954)
• Maxime (1958)
• The Longest Day (1962)

References

1. ^ Geoffrey Nowell Smith, The Oxford History of World Cinema, page 347. See also Arletty, allocine.fr: "mon coeur est français mais mon cul est international !"

Further reading

• Arletty : La Défense, de la Table ronde, Paris, 1971
• Arletty / Michel Souvais : Je suis comme je suis, Vertiges du Nord / Carrère, Paris, 1987, ISBN 2-86804-404-2.
• Michel Souvais : Arletty, confidences à son secrétaire, Publibook, Paris, September 2006.

External links

• Arletty at the Internet Movie Database
• Arletty at the TCM Movie Database
• Arletty at Allmovie
• Arletty at Find a Grave
• Arletty at filmsdefrance.com
• Interview d'Arletty avec Marcel Carné (Paris Match 1992)
• Arletty esoteric biography via 4dbios [1]
• bibliography
• (German) Eine Liebe in Zeiten des Krieges. Die Zeit, No. 32, 2009