Leslie Caron

Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (French: [lɛsli kaʁɔ̃]; born 1 July 1931) is a French and American actress and dancer. She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards.

Caron began her career as a ballerina. She made her film debut in the musical An American in Paris (1951), followed by roles in The Man with a Cloak (1951), Glory Alley (1952) and The Story of Three Loves (1953), before her role of an orphan in Lili (also 1953), which earned her the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress and garnered nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

As a leading lady, Caron starred in films such as The Glass Slipper (1955), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), Fanny (1961), both of which earned her Golden Globe nominations, Guns of Darkness (1962), The L-Shaped Room (1962), Father Goose (1964) and A Very Special Favor (1965). For her role as a single pregnant woman in The L-Shaped Room, Caron, in addition to receiving a second Academy Award nomination, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and a second BAFTA Award.

Caron's other roles include Is Paris Burning? (1966), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Valentino (1977), Damage (1992), Funny Bones (1995), Chocolat (2000) and Le Divorce (2003). In 2007, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for portraying heiress and rape victim, Lorraine Delmas, in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Caron was born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Seine (now Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine), the daughter of Margaret (née Petit), a Franco-American dancer on Broadway, and Claude Caron, a French chemist, pharmacist, perfumer and boutique owner.^[1] Claude Caron was the founder of the artisanal perfumier Guermantes.^[2] While her older brother, Aimery Caron, became a chemist like their father, Leslie was prepared for a performing career from childhood by her mother.^[3] Her great-grandfather, Ernest Caron was a distinguished Parisian politician of the Belle Époque and her grandmother Andrée Caron was a grandchild of Armand Savalle the global still maker. Her family lost its wealth during World War II and could not provide a dowry for Caron. "My mother said: 'There's only one profession that leads you to marrying money and becoming a princess or duchess, and that's ballet.' ... My grandfather whispered heavily: 'Margaret, you want your daughter to be a whore?' I heard it. This has always followed me". ^[4]

Of the lost fortune, Caron recalled, "My mother died of it". Her mother, who had grown up in poverty, could not cope with their reduced circumstances. She became depressed and an alcoholic and, at age 67, killed herself.^[4]

Caron was initially a ballerina. Gene Kelly discovered her in the Roland Petit company "Ballet des Champs Elysées" and cast her to appear opposite him in the musical An American in Paris (1951), a role for which a pregnant Cyd Charisse was originally cast. The prosperity, sunshine and abundance of California was a cultural shock to Caron. She had lived in Paris during the German occupation, which left her malnourished and anemic. She later remarked how nice people were in comparison to wartime Paris, in which poverty and deprivation had caused people to be bitter and violent. She had a friendly relationship with Kelly, who nicknamed her "Lester the Pester"^[5] and "kid". Kelly helped the inexperienced Caron—who had never spoken on stage—adjust to filmmaking.^[4].

Her role led to a seven-year MGM contract.^[4] The films which followed included the musical The Glass Slipper (1955) and the drama The Man with a Cloak (1951), with Joseph Cotten and Barbara Stanwyck. Still, Caron has said of herself: "Unfortunately, Hollywood considers musical dancers as hoofers. Regrettable expression." She also starred in the musicals Lili (1953, receiving an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination), with Mel Ferrer; Daddy Long Legs (1955), with Fred Astaire; and Gigi (1958) with Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier.

Dissatisfied with her career despite her success ("I thought musicals were futile and silly", she said in 2021; "I appreciate them better now"), Caron studied the Stanislavski method.^[4] In the 1960s and thereafter, Caron worked in European films as well. For her performance in the British drama The L-Shaped Room (1962), she won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress and the Golden Globe, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar.^[6] Her other film assignments in this period included Father Goose (1964) with Cary Grant; Ken Russell's Valentino (1977), in the role of silent-screen legend Alla Nazimova; and Louis Malle's Damage (1992). Sometime in 1970, Caron was one of the many actresses considered for the lead role of Eglantine Price in Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, losing the role to British actress Angela Lansbury.

In 1967, she was a member of the jury of the 5th Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF).^[7] In 1989, she was a member of the jury at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.^[8] Caron returned to France in the early 1970s, which she later said was a mistake. "They adore someone who's really British or really American", Caron said, "but somebody who's French and has made it in Hollywood – and I was the only one who had really made it in a big way – they can't forgive".^[4]

During the 1980s, she appeared in several episodes of the soap opera Falcon Crest as Nicole Sauguet. Caron is one of the few actresses from the classic era of MGM musicals who are still active in film — a group that includes Rita Moreno, Margaret O'Brien and June Lockhart. Caron's later credits include Funny Bones (1995) with Jerry Lewis and Oliver Platt; The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000) with Judi Dench and Cleo Laine; Chocolat (2000) and Le Divorce (2003), directed by James Ivory, with Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts. On June 30, 2003, Caron travelled to San Francisco to appear as the special guest star in The Songs of Alan Jay Lerner: I Remember It Well, a retrospective concert staged by San Francisco's 42nd Street Moon Company.

In 2007, her guest appearance on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. On April 27, 2009, Caron travelled to New York as an honoured guest at a tribute to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe at the Paley Center for Media.^[9] For her contributions to the film industry, Caron was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 8, 2009, with a motion pictures star located at 6153 Hollywood Boulevard.^[10] In February 2010, she played Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, which also featured Greta Scacchi and Lambert Wilson.^[11] In 2016, Caron appeared in the ITV television series The Durrells (produced by her son Christopher Hall) as the Countess Mavrodaki. Veteran documentarian Larry Weinstein's Leslie Caron: The Reluctant Star premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) on June 28, 2016.^[12]

In September 1951, Caron married American George Hormel II, a grandson of George A. Hormel, the founder of the Hormel meat-packing company. They divorced in 1954.^[13][14] During that period, while under contract to MGM, she lived in Laurel Canyon in a Normandie style 1927 mansion near the country store on Laurel Canyon Blvd. One bedroom was all mirrored for her dancing rehearsals.

Her second husband was British theatre director Peter Hall. They married in 1956 and had two children: Christopher John Hall, a television drama producer, and Jennifer Caron Hall, a writer, painter and actress. Her son-in-law, married to Jennifer, is Glenn Wilhide, a producer and screenwriter. Caron had an affair with Warren Beatty in 1961. When she and Hall divorced in 1965, Beatty was named as a co-respondent and was ordered by the London court to pay the costs of the case.^[15] In 1969, Caron married Michael Laughlin, the producer of the film Two-Lane Blacktop; the couple divorced in 1980. Caron was also romantically linked to Dutch television actor Robert Wolders from 1994 to 1995.^[16]

From 1981, she rented and lived for a few years in a mill (the "Moulin Neuf") in the French village of Chaumot, Yonne, which had belonged to Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony in the late 18th century and which depended on his princely castle.^[17] From June 1993 until September 2009, Caron owned and operated the hotel and restaurant Auberge la Lucarne aux Chouettes (The Owls' Nest), in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, about 130 km (80 mi) south of Paris.^[18] Caron's mother had committed suicide in her 60s; suffering from a lifetime of depression, Caron also considered doing so in 1995. She was hospitalized for a month and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous.^[4] Unhappy with the lack of acting opportunities in France, she returned to England in 2013.

In her autobiography, Thank Heaven, she states that she obtained American citizenship in time to vote for Barack Obama for president.^[19] In October 2021, she was chosen to receive the Oldie of the Year Award by The Oldie magazine.^[20] It had been initially offered to Queen Elizabeth II, who had declined it on the grounds that she did not meet the criteria, even though she was five years older than Caron.^[21]

• The Lover (l'Amant) by Marguerite Duras on cassettes
• First World War for the radio
• Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien by Claude Debussy and Gabriele d'Annunzio, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas
• Gigi by Colette in English on cassettes recorded in public at Merkin Concert Hall at Abraham Goodman House in New York City, 1996
• Narrated "Carnival of the Animals" music by Camille Saint-Saëns with the Nash Ensemble – Wigmore Hall, 1999
• The Plutocrats play for the BBC dir. Bill Bryden, written by Michael Hastings, from the novel by Booth Tarkington, January 1999

• Caron, Leslie: Vengeance. Doubleday, 1982. ISBN 978-0-3851-7896-9
• Caron, Leslie: Thank Heaven: A Memoir. Viking Adult, 2009. ISBN 978-0-6700-2134-5

• List of dancers

• Leslie Caron at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Leslie Caron at IMDb 
• Leslie Caron at the TCM Movie Database