Charles Boyer, the seducer who died of love

"Strong, energetic, domineering, with a perennial veil of sadness or longing in his hard, searching eyes.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 June 2022 Friday 19:09
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Charles Boyer, the seducer who died of love

"Strong, energetic, domineering, with a perennial veil of sadness or longing in his hard, searching eyes." The chronicles of the time defined Charles Boyer (1899-1978) as a great seducer, as the Latin lover who came from France to conquer the most beautiful actresses. Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Arthur, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman were in his arms. But only on the big screen, because in real life Boyer only had eyes for his wife, Patricia Patterson, to whom he joined a long marriage that lasted forever.

Born in Figeac, a small French town, Boyer, who had a prodigious memory and a great imagination to his credit, always wanted to be an actor. He studied Philosophy in Paris at the same time that he gave theater classes and it did not take him long to stand out on the stages of the capital. So they called him from Hollywood where he did some movies that he wasn't satisfied with. He returned home, improved his English and again returned to the Mecca of cinema, but again he was disappointed, he did not like his participation in a film called Caravana (Erik Charell, 1934).

And suddenly, just when he was ready to throw in the towel, Boyer met producer Walter Wanger who turned his work and personal life upside down. Wanger gave him a role in the film Private Worlds (Gregory La Cava, 1935), a drama with Claudette Colbert, Joan Bennet and Joel McCrea, which made the French actor an overnight star. In addition, Wanger introduced him to an English actress he has just signed, Patricia Patterson.

The real love story between Charles and Pat surpassed the fictional ones of the many romantic scripts that the actor played. His "was a withering case of infatuation." The actor declared himself to the young woman a few days after meeting her. They started dating. One day they went to the theater, but the tickets had sold out. They didn't know what to do, so Boyer proposed "let's get married." They got married in 1934 and went to Paris on a honeymoon. There they filmed together Mayerling (Anatole Litvak, 1936).

The couple returned to Hollywood. Boyer already had his place among the stars and his career was unstoppable. He starred in The Garden of Allah (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), a color film with Marlene Dietrich, where he played a monk who runs away from the convent, he meets Marlene with whom he establishes a passionate relationship. But she leaves him when she learns about his past. He then joined Jean Arthur in the comedy Midnight Dinner (Frank Borzage, 1937). He was a hotel butler and she was a millionaire who had an adventure on an ocean liner.

The film worked and Hollywood paired Boyer with Claudette Colbert, another of the comedy queens of the 1930s, in Tovarich (Anatole Litvak, 1937) where they became a couple of Russian aristocrats who escaped the revolution and were employed as servants in a mansion in Paris. With Algiers (John Cromwell, 1938) and his role as the jewel thief Pepe le Moko who is recklessly blown away by the charms of Hedy Lamarr, Boyer achieved an Oscar nomination and established himself definitively.

He was at the top and could choose the best roles. She chose an unforgettable one, that of the playboy from You and I (Leo McCarey, 1939) who (again on a cruise) falls in love with Irene Dunne. They both decide to fix their lives and meet after six months, but she has an accident and cannot keep the date. McCarey shot a remake in 1957 with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, which was as successful as the first version and even more so.

He entered the 1940s with another great role, that of the seductive Georges Iscovescu in If No Dawn (Mitchell Leisen, 1941). Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder signed the script for this drama that has not lost its relevance. A group of immigrants waits in a small border town in Mexico for their opportunity to reach the United States. Iscovescu, fed up with waiting, falls in love with a naive teacher, Olivia de Havilland, and marries her to obtain her nationality.

Boyer was adored by audiences and coworkers alike for "his unassuming, reserved character." His modesty was famous. But Wilder and Brackett took a liking to him during the filming of If No Dawn. According to Wilder in his memoirs, Leisen cut out a scene in which the actor was talking to a cockroach, and Boyer agreed: "When we found out that Monsieur Boyer was too fine to talk to a cockroach, we were still writing the script. So we said to each other: if he doesn't want to talk, he won't talk anymore. And we left him speechless. Clandestinely, we gave all the remaining text to de Havilland."

The trick of the screenwriters did not prevent Boyer from being applauded by the public and receiving a new Oscar nomination. The actor was at the top and decided to change his record at the hands of George Cukor and with Ingrid Bergman as his partner. Dying Light (1943) marked the beginning of a new career as a dramatic actor for Boyer, away from the roles of romantic seducer that had brought him fame.

In the film he became a sinister pianist from the Victorian era who undermined the self-esteem of his naive wife trying to drive her crazy. The film was so successful that the expression "gaslighting" became popular to the point that it is already included in the dictionary with the definition "trying to make someone doubt their reason or judgment through prolonged work to discredit their perceptions and memories ".

Although Hollywood continued to give him shelter in works such as The Sin of Cluny Brown (Ernst Lubitsch, 1946) or Arc de Triomphe (Lewis Milestone, 1948), Boyer preferred to live his professional maturity in the theater and went to Broadway to raise a text by Jean -Paul Sartre. But he still had something left to contribute to the seventh art. In 1953 he undertook the command of Max Ophüls in Madame de... to compose a trio of great actors with Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica.

And in 1962 he became Julio Madariaga, the Argentine patriarch of a clan who saw his family split into two sides as a result of World War II. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was based on the novel by Blasco Ibáñez, directed by Vicente Minnelli and starring Glenn Ford. Boyer did not fall into series B productions like other actors of his generation and ended his career with the same dignity with which he had started it.

His personal life was spent next to Patricia. As usual. The couple lost a son in 1965, but remained together. She passed away on August 24, 1978. Boyer killed himself two days later with an overdose of Seconal. They had been together 44 years. They couldn't live without each other. The press echoed the death of the actor with a headline that was unanimous in the pages of newspapers around the world: "Charles Boyer died of love."