Estella Blain

Estella Blain , born Micheline Estellat (born March 30, 1930 in Paris , † January 1, 1982 in Port-Vendres ) was a French actress and singer .

Life

Micheline Estellat, the daughter of Basque parents, grew up in the Montmartre district of Paris, near the Studios Francœur film studio. At the beginning of the 1950s she took acting courses with René Simon . At almost 23 years of age, the originally brunette young woman was discovered by the film director Hervé Bromberger and given one of the leading female roles in the troubled melodrama Wilde Frucht. A little later, Estella Blain had her hair bleached - a color she was to keep until the end - and had a nose job done on her. Her attractive appearance meant that Estella Blain - briefly called le corps (the body) by the zeitgeist of the time - was used in her subsequent films almost exclusively reduced to her visual charms. She played femmes fatales , more rarely intimidated good girls from a good family like her lisping daughter who always only said "Yes, Papa" in Werner Jacobs ' operetta adaptation Im Weisse Rössl , Estella Blain's only German-language film.

The majority of her films are works by the light muse, but she was also seen in productions of the Nouvelle Vague . With increasing dissatisfaction with her film career, Estella Blain took a detour to the theater (appearances in the plays La Mama and Le placard, among others ). From 1964 she also tried herself as a chansonette with her own lyrics. Since the early 1970s, Estella Blain received no more offers from the cinema and she switched to television work. She played roles in Puzzle pour demons , Le soldat et la sorcière , La dame aux coquillages and, most recently, L'oiseau bleu , which she directed under the Danish director Gabriel Axel . One week after the broadcast of her last TV film , she committed suicide on New Year's Eve 1981/82 by shooting herself in her garden with the gun of her then partner.

Estella Blain was married to professional colleague Gérard Blain for four years in the 1950s and had kept his last name after the separation in 1957. Her sister-in-law (regarding her second marriage to Michel Bonjean) was the actress Geneviève Page .

Filmography

• 1953: Wild fruits ( Fruits sauvages )
• 1954: Mary Lou and her masters ( Escalier de service )
• 1955: Tant qu'il y aura des femmes
• 1956: Young roses in the wind ( Les collégiennes )
• 1957: Potassium cyanide ( La bonne tisane )
• 1958: Blonde freight and black devils ( Des femmes disparaissent )
• 1958: The predator settles accounts ( Le fauve est lâché )
• 1959: Those who hunger for love ( Les dragueurs )
• 1960: Cold Rage ( Colère froide )
• 1960: The boss knows no mercy ( L'ennemi dans l'ombre )
• 1960: Pirate Coast ( I pirati della costa )
• 1960: In the White Horse Inn
• 1961: Tototruffa 62
• 1965: La corde au cou
• 1965: Angélique and the King ( Angélique et le roy )
• 1966: The secret of Dr. Z. ( Miss Muerte )
• 1967: Vivre la nuit
• 1968: A Flea in Her Ear ( A Flea in Her Ear )
• 1968: Les têtes coupées
• 1971: Les nus
• 1973: Les hasards de la gloire
• 1973: The wild sheep ( Le mouton enragé )
• 1974: Le soldat et la sorcière (TV movie)
• 1981: L'oiseau bleu (TV movie)

Individual evidence

Web links

• Estella Blain in the Internet Movie Database (English)