“She will forever be the face of the French resistance.” “She was a free woman who lived by her own rules, totally inhabiting the roles entrusted to her by leading directors,” the French culture minister, Audrey Azoulay, said of Lebeau in an official announcement. A striking shot from the “Marseillaise” scene accompanied many of the death notices. In the obituaries published in newspapers and posted on websites across the globe, Lebeau’s age was given as 92, and she was widely presumed to have been the last surviving cast member. As Captain Renault (played by Claude Rains) wittily observes of Yvonne, when she returns to Rick’s: “In her own way she may constitute an entire second front.” Although later in life she is said to have regretted that she didn’t have more lines and more screen time in Casablanca, she surely left her mark on the picture. Pabst’s Jeunes filles en détresse ( Young Girls in Trouble, 1939) up to her late role as Madeleine, a French actress and former lover of Marcello Mastroianni’s character in Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Lebeau brought a certain zeal and commitment to her performances. Over the course of her extended career, from her uncredited debut in G. Landing in Mexico, they were able to get temporary Canadian visas and, with them in hand, crossed the border to California and eventually to the back lot at Warner Bros. Quanza, a Portuguese ship carrying hundreds of émigrés to the New World. Shortly before the German invasion of Paris, Dalio and Lebeau made their way to Lisbon, that prized destination for languishing refugees in Casablanca, and from there, using forged visas, secured passage on the S.S. In an ugly turn, close-ups of Dalio, taken from those films, were appropriated on anti-Semitic Vichy propaganda placards. Without Yvonne, without her inimitable voice and her tears, the scene is unthinkable.Īs it turns out, Lebeau herself had fled Nazi-engulfed Europe with her Jewish husband, Marcel Dalio, who plays Emil the croupier at Rick’s Café and who was already famous in Europe for his winning performances in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion ( Grand Illusion, 1937) and La Règle du jeu ( Rules of the Game, 1939). “I think it was the most moving patriotic scene ever played in any picture,” remarked Russian-born actor Leonid Kinskey, who played Sascha the barman, three decades after the film was released. She ultimately reveals her true colors by singing a vigorous rendition of “La Marseillaise” during the pivotal scene in which the café patrons sing the French national anthem with increasing fervor to drown out the competing Nazi chorus of “Die Wacht am Rhein.” Tears stream down her trembling cheeks, shot in luminous close-up, as she cries out “Vive la France!” and “Vive la démocratie!” Not yet 20 when the film was made, the French-born Lebeau turned in a spirited performance as Yvonne, the young woman who gets snubbed by Humphrey Bogart in the film’s first act, only to return defiantly to Rick’s Café Américain-shifting her allegiances with the speed of a Vichy opportunist-on the arm of a Nazi officer. Like so many other fans, I was reminded of the movie’s indelible place in our cultural lexicon in the spring of 2016, when news arrived that cast member Madeleine Lebeau had passed away in a small Spanish town on the Costa del Sol.
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