Jean-Pierre Aumont

Biography: life and films

With his juvenile good looks and smooth, debonair charm, Jean-Pierre Aumont was naturally suited for a career as an actor. In fact, he came from an acting family - his mother was an actress and his great uncle, Georges Berr, was a member of the Comédie-Française and also a playwright. In a career that spanned 65 years, Aumont managed to notch up 88 film appearances for cinema and a further 71 for television. The list of directors he worked for in a busy career divided between France and Hollywood reads like a roll-call of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century - Sacha Guitry, Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, Sam Wood, Robert Siodmak, Alberto Cavalcanti, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Mervyn LeRoy, James Ivory (to name just ten).

Aumont, whose real name was Jean-Pierre Philippe Salomons, was born in Paris, France, on 5th January 1911. Determined to follow his mother's profession, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 16 to study drama, and made his stage debut a few years later. Then came his first screen appearance, a supporting role alongside Michel Simon and Madeleine Renaud, in Jean Choux's Jean de la Lune (1931). He then had his first leading role in Victor Trivas's Dans les rues (1933). Aumont's big break came when Jean Cocteau gave him the part of Oedipus in his 1934 stage play La Machine infernale, directed by Louis Jouvet. This, together with the actor's charismatic presence in Marc Allégret's Lac aux dames and Julien Duvivier's Maria Chapdelaine that same year, served to establish Aumont as a promising juvenile performer. He subsequently starred with Annabella and Charles Vanel in Anatole Litavk's classy melodrama L'Équipage (1935), and then with Jules Berry in Robert Siodmak's Le Chemin de Rio (1937).

Marcel Carné gave Aumont two memorable and very different roles in Drôle de drame (1937) and Hôtel du Nord (1938). The actor was set to become one of the leading lights of French cinema when WWII intervened and brought a temporary halt to his career. Because of his Jewish background, Aumont beat a hasty retreat from France when the Germans took control of the country in 1940. He moved to New York, leaving behind his wife Blanche Montel, whom he had married in 1934, before resuming his acting career in Hollywood in 1943. He began by appearing in two war films appertaining to the war in France: Jack Conway's Assignment in Brittany and Tay Garnett's The Cross of Lorraine. Having played a war hero on screen, he became one in real life by enlisting in the Free French Forces in June 1943. Part of the contingent that liberated France in 1944, Aumont was wounded twice in combat and was subsequently awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'honneur.

On his return to Hollywood after the war, Aumont partnered Ginger Rogers in Heartbeat (1946) and played the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Song of Scheherazade (1947). It was whilst working in America that Aumont met the Dominican actress María Montez. The couple married in 1943 and had a daughter, Tina Aumont, three years later. Aumont and Montez appeared in two films together, Siren of Atlantis (1949) and Hans le marin (1949), two years before Montez was found dead in her bath. After a brief liaison with Grace Kelly, Aumont married the Italian actress Marisa Pavan in 1956. They divorced but later remarried and had two sons, Jean-Claude Aumont and Patrick Aumont. Aumont and Pavan appeared in one film together: John Farrow's John Paul Jones (1959).

By this time, Aumont's younger brother had begun to make a name as a film director, as François Villiers. Aumont was directed by Villiers on a number of occasions, first in Hans le marin (1949), then in a cameo part in Le Puits aux trois vérités (1961), later in two popular television series: Les Chevaliers du ciel (1968) and Quelques hommes de bonne volonté (1983). Whilst he never became a big star, Jean-Pierre Aumont had an incredibly active career, both on stage and screen, throughout the 1950s and 60s. On stage, he impressed audiences in productions of Albert Husson's Les Pavés du ciel (1953/4) and Sacha Guitry's Mon père avait raison (1959), and for the cinema he was busy on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, he made two films for Gilles Grangier - L'Homme de joie (1950), L'Amant de paille (1951) - and also was gainfully employed by Sacha Guitry on Si Versailles m'était conté (1954) and Napoléon (1955). In Hollywood, he performed magic tricks with Leslie Caron in Lili (1953) and later lent his support to Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra in the early disaster movie The Devil at Four O'Clock (1961). In 1963, he proved his versatility further by starring on Broadway with Vivien Leigh in David Shaw's musical play Tovarich.

From the 1970s, his career in obvious decline, Aumont was too willing to offer his talents to mediocre films that have mostly been forgotten. He still had a few choice roles - for example, playing an actor past his prime in François Truffaut's La Nuit américaine (1973) and Michèle Morgan's ill-fated husband in Claude Lelouch's Le Chat et la souris (1975) - but these were pretty rare in the dismal fag-end of his career. He was better served by television - he made a guest appearance in two episodes of the series Starsky and Hutch and then cropped up in the star-studded serial The French Atlantic Affair (1979). He also had a prominent role in the television serial The Free Frenchman (1989). His final TV role was as Edgar Degas in the series Young Indiana Jones (1993). James Ivory and Ismail Merchant gave Aumont his last film roles in Jefferson in Paris (1995) and The Proprietor (1996). In 1991, the actor received an honorary César for his life's work. He died from a heart attack at the age of 90 on 30th January 2001, in Gassin in the south of France. For a more illuminating account of the actor's life the reader is referred to Aumont's 1976 autobiography: Le Soleil et les ombres.

Filmography

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