June Duprez

[scoundrel]

Born May 1918: if Ms Duprez were still with us, she would be 94 years old, which is not quite impossible. But thanks to the miracle of cinema she will always be young and beautiful.

Duprez was her real name; she was from a showbiz family. She had early success in British cinema but became entangled in the bankrupcy of Alexander Korda, whose avaricious attitude to her studio contract, one of his few remaining valuable assets, made it very difficult for her to get work for several years. In spite of several starring roles (notably in The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad), her career had completely stalled and she was penniless in Hollywood, cut off by the war from a safe return to her home country, where in any case her parents were dead and she had no home to return to.

She found herself scratching a subsistence existence as a salesperson and pawning bits of jewelry when things got really tight. Her fortunes turned a little bit when Nigel Bruce (who played Dr Watson opposite Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes) accidentally got word of how crap her luck had turned and helped her out. He and Mrs Bruce put her up in their grown-up daughter's old room as a non-paying lodger (she was pretty much homeless) and reintroduced her to filmland, enabling her to network in a world which had forgotten she was still there. Cary Grant cast her as his leading lady in his own production, None But The Lonely Heart, a screen adaptation of How Green Was My Valley. The film was only a modest success but she did well enough to get a small but invaluable contract with RKO. Her last (and IMHO best) film was the 1945 murder-mystery film made by Rene Clair; And Then There Were None. She was really good in that film.

However, she had had a rough time in Hollywood and was happy to move over to Broadway and the theatre, being by now a big enough name in America that she could get steady work on the stage; she had been in repetory theatre in the UK long before she ever met Korda and could act on stage, which not all actors can do. The gramaphone record in the plot of And Then There Were None in which the characters are individually condemned to death by their anonymous executioner is called Swansong;and that film, which she made at the age of 28, was June Duprez's last significant acting excursion on celluloid. She did well on Broadway and later got married and raised a family; but her light shone brief and fitfully in cinema, which is a pity.

Here is a small collection of June Duprez's images from cinema.

[Sam Spade]

The colour versions are by Malustudio.