Born: 25 August, 1917, in New Jersey, US.
Died: 2 June, 2008, in California, aged 90. MEL Ferrer disliked acting in films as much as he loved directing them. Nevertheless, he made his name in front of the cameras in movi
es such as The Brave Bulls, Lili and War and Peace.
He was also widely known for his ties with Audrey Hepburn, his wife of 14 years. He directed and acted with her on-screen and produced an acclaimed thriller, Wait Until Dark, in which she starred. To television viewers, he was familiar as the lawyer (and later husband) of the Jane Wyman character in the 1980s US soap opera Falcon Crest..
Ferrer made his directing debut with a low-budget remake of The Girl of the Limberlost (1945), the story of a widow who inflicts her grief on her children. But it was in the theatre, in New York, that he began his career. On Broadway, his credits included acting in a 1945 stage adaptation of Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, about an ill-fated interracial love affair in a Georgia town, and directing José Ferrer (no relation) in Cyrano de Bergerac in 1946.
Still hoping to make it as a Hollywood director, he returned to California and worked as John Ford's assistant on the 1947 classic The Fugitive.
But, again, acting roles came his way. Tall, lean and darkly handsome, Ferrer made his first credited screen appearance in Lost Boundaries (1949), in which he won praise for his portrayal of a light-skinned black doctor passing for white. That part led to a role as an artist in Born to Be Bad (1950), which starred Joan Fontaine as a predatory beauty.
But it was with The Brave Bulls (1951) that Ferrer became a star.
Directed by Robert Rossen, the film told the story of a man who rises from humble beginnings to become Mexico's most idolised matador. Outwardly heroic, the matador is torn by inner doubts, and Ferrer's performance was convincing.
Indeed, the role was very much a reflection of his own state of mind. He had more than once been heard to say how much he disliked acting, which he called "a self-conscious business". He also described himself as "a screaming schizoid", an introvert disguised as an extrovert.
However, he continued to act. In Scaramouche (1952), a swashbuckler set in 18th-century France, he fought a climactic duel with Stewart Granger. And then there was Lili (1953), in which he gave what many considered his best performance, as a lame carnival puppeteer who befriends an orphan girl played by Leslie Caron.
Ferrer donned boots and sword again as a Russian nobleman who joins the fight against Napoleon in War and Peace (1956). Directed by King Vidor, the film featured Audrey Hepburn, a beautiful young actress whom Ferrer had married in 1954.
Earlier that year, they had appeared together on Broadway in Ondine. Adapted from a story by Jean Giraudoux, with music from Virgil Thomson, it was the mythological tale of a water sprite's doomed love affair with an egotistical knight-errant. Hepburn won a Tony Award, as did the show's director, Alfred Lunt.
Ferrer went on to direct Hepburn in the 1959 film Green Mansions, about a fugitive (Anthony Perkins) who finds love in a South American jungle. In Wait Until Dark, the 1967 thriller that Ferrer produced, Hepburn played a blind woman terrorised in her apartment by drug smugglers.
Melchior Gaston Ferrer was born in Elberon, New Jersey. His father was a Cuban-born surgeon, his mother a Manhattan socialite. He attended private schools and studied at Princeton University but dropped out. He worked for a Vermont newspaper, moved to Mexico to write a novel, wrote a children's book, Tito's Hats and became a dancer on Broadway.
In the early 1940s, after recovering from polio, he found work as a disc jockey and then in television, at NBC. Soon he was in Hollywood, directing The Girl of the Limberlost.
Ferrer's later screen credits, in the 1950s and 1960s, included The Sun Also Rises (1957), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), the Second World War epic The Longest Day (1962) and Sex and the Single Girl (1964). In 1966, he was the star, and a producer, of El Greco, a poorly received portrait of the 16th-century painter.
By then, Ferrer was spending an increasing amount of his time in Europe. He had bought a home in the Swiss city of Lausanne and acted in and directed low-budget European films. He had a heart attack in the late 1960s.
Two of his more notable later appearances were in Brannigan (1975), with John Wayne and Richard Attenborough as lawmen and Ferrer as a conspiratorial lawyer, and in Lili Marleen (1981), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in which Ferrer played a Swiss businessman who helps rescue Jews from Nazi Germany.
For all his acting success, however, Ferrer remained ambivalent about it. "I curl up inside and freeze when I have to act," he once said in an interview. "I much prefer sitting on the sidelines and trying to get the best out of other people."
Ferrer's marriage to Hepburn ended in divorce in 1968. She died in 1993. He had earlier been married and divorced three times, to Frances Pilchard, to Barbara Tripp and again to Ms Pilchard. He had five children, including a son with Hepburn.
In 1971, Ferrer married his fourth wife, Elizabeth Soukhotine, who survives him, along with his children and several grandchildren.
The full article contains 927 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
