Leslie Caron
b. 1 July 1931, Paris, France. An elegant, captivating actress and dancer, Caron's mother was Margaret Petit, American ballet dancer, and her father, Claude Caron was a wealthy chemist with his own pharmacy in Paris. That is until France was occupied during World War II when the Caron family, like so many others, lost their fortune. Even so, Leslie Caron took ballet lessons, and had a ballet called LA RECONTRE written especially for her. She was 17 and dancing professionally with the Ballet des Champs Elysées when she was seen by Gene Kellywho returned to Paris a year later to test her for the film An American In Paris. She accepted the ingenue role opposite him in Vincente Minnelli's charming film which won six Academy Awards, including one for best picture, following its release in 1951. She followed her enchanting performance in that film with others equally appealing in LILI, THE GLASS SLIPPER, Daddy Long Legs, and Gigi (1958). By the time she made the latter multi-Oscar winner, Caron was 27 and a mother, but she still managed to retain her fresh, gamin image. After her first marriage was dissolved in 1954, she married the British stage director Peter Hall two years later. He discouraged her from acting, although, having developed into a serious actress on the stage and screen in between her musical films, she did manage to do some work, including Jean Giraudoux's play ONDINE for the RSC in 1961. A romantic relationship with the actor Warren Beatty precipitated her divorce from Hall in 1965, and she and Beatty lived together in the USA for two years. In 1969 she married the American producer Michael Laughlin who was six years her junior. During the '60s she returned to films, and although there were no more musicals among them, she was acclaimed for her dramatic performance in THE L-SHAPED ROOM (1962), and she and Cary Grant made an amusing couple in FATHER GOOSE (1964). Her most recent film to date is DAMAGE with Jeremy Irons. She lives in Paris and New York, and continues to perform on stage, sometimes in plays she has written herself. In 1991 she learnt German so that she could play the role of the fading ballerina Grushinskaya in a stage production of the musical Grand Hotel. Two years later she opened her own restaurant in the Burgundy town of Villeneuve, having painstakingly converted a group of dilapidated 13th century houses over a period of five years.