AKA Louis Gendre

Born: 19-Jun-1919
Birthplace: Marseille, France

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Actor

Nationality: France
Executive summary: Kamal in Octopussy

Louis Jourdan made his film debut in 1939, in Le Corsaire with Charles Boyer. After his native France fell to Germany in 1940, Jourdan worked in films to support himself, and he was also a low-level operative with the French Resistance. He had his first starring role shortly after the liberation, in 1945's La Vie de Bohème. His first American film was Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case with Gregory Peck in 1947. For the rest of his career, Jourdan worked as often in Hollywood as in Europe. In most of his English-language roles, he was typecast as a romantic Frenchman. He is probably best known for the musical Gigi, where he played a French playboy in his late 30s who seduced Leslie Caron the moment she came of legal age, while Maurice Chevalier sang "Thank Heaven for Little Girls".

In other memorable performances, Jourdan played the philandering pianist in Letter from an Unknown Woman with Joan Fontaine, tried to steal Elizabeth Taylor from Richard Burton in The VIPs, and sang again with Chevalier and Shirley MacLaine in Can-Can. He was the unseen French-accented narrator of Irma la Douce with Jack Lemmon and MacLaine, and he played an unusually highbrow Count Dracula in a 1977 adaptation for BBC TV, which aired on PBS in America. Jourdan also had a flair for longwinded criminal masterminds, playing the suave Kamal Khan in the Bond thriller Octopussy, Dr. Anton Arcane in Swamp Thing and The Return of Swamp Thing, and the evil madman in the winery romance Year of the Comet, which was Jourdan's last film. In retirement, he returned to the south of France.

Father: Henri Gendre
Mother: Yvonne Jourdan
Wife: Berthe Frederique (wife #2, m. 11-Mar-1946, one son)
Son: Louis Henry George Jourdan (b. 6-Oct-1951, d. 1981 suicide by drug overdose)

    FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
    Year of the Comet (24-Apr-1992)
    The Return of Swamp Thing (12-May-1989)
    Octopussy (6-Jun-1983)
    Swamp Thing (Mar-1982)
    Silver Bears (21-Apr-1978)
    Count Dracula (22-Dec-1977)
    The Man in the Iron Mask (17-Jan-1977)
    The Count of Monte Cristo (10-Jan-1975)
    Made in Paris (9-Feb-1966)
    The V.I.P.'s (1-Sep-1963)
    Amazons of Rome (1961)
    Can-Can (9-Mar-1960)
    The Best of Everything (9-Oct-1959)
    Gigi (15-May-1958)
    Dangerous Exile (1957)
    Julie (17-Oct-1956)
    The Swan (26-Apr-1956)
    Three Coins in the Fountain (20-May-1954)
    Decameron Nights (16-Nov-1953)
    Rue de l'estrapade (1953)
    Anne of the Indies (18-Oct-1951)
    Bird of Paradise (14-Mar-1951)
    Madame Bovary (25-Aug-1949)
    Letter from an Unknown Woman (13-Sep-1948)
    The Paradine Case (31-Dec-1947)

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