Lucky indeed. Not only was Mel Ferrer married to the supremely beautiful Audrey Hepburn for some 14 years, he got to star opposite her as Prince Andrei in King Vidor’s 3½-hour epic War and Peace (1956, below) and to direct her in the hallucinatory romantic fantasy Green Mansions (1959).
Although Melchior Gaston Ferrer (no relation to actors José or Miguel) never quite achieved major stardom, he worked - first as a leading man, later as a distinguished character actor - for an incredible group of directors that included Vidor, Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad), Fritz Lang (Rancho Notorious), Michael Powell (Oh... Rosalinda!!), Jean Renoir (Elena et les Hommes), Roger Vadim (Blood and Roses), Anthony Mann (as the blind man who murders Alec Guiness’s character with a poisoned apple in The Fall of the Roman Empire), Richard Quine (Sex and the Single Girl), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Lili Marleen). Fans of MGM musicals remember him most fondly for his role opposite Leslie Caron in Charles Walters’ Lili. Afficionados of apocalyptic sci-fi recall him as the last racist on Earth opposite Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens in The World, the Flesh and the Devil.
Ferrer directed Audrey Hepburn in Green Mansions like a man in love with her. No doubt he was. Her first appearance in that film, a jungle spirit emerging like a vision from the heart of the Amazon, was also the first time I remember seeing the actress, and I was imprinted by it forever. (The first woman I was engaged to was an Audrey Hepburn type – but that’s another story.) Critics were not kind to the film, impressed neither by its lush widescreen visuals nor by the equally lush musical score that accompanied them. Given its powerful ecological message, the film was arguably ahead of its time. Green Mansions may not be great art, but one can appreciate it for what is, an entertaining South American pulp jungle fantasy to place alongside the likes of The Naked Jungle and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.Ferrer also produced Wait Until Dark (Terence Young 1967), again starring Audrey Hepburn, in which she gives an exquisitely masochistic performance (Academy Award-nominated) as a blind girl tormented by a villainous Alan Arkin.
And he lived to be 90.
2 comments:
Hello! Remember this?
If I were a cartoonist, i.e., if I could actually draw, I’d love to publish a political cartoon depicting Navy man John McCain as Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”
Well, ask and ye shall receive.
(Found your site searching for the original image).
Many thanks, Gnarly!
It figures that that the cartoon would appear in a British paper - they know their Coleridge better than us Yanks.
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