What could be done to improve the acting of Capucine, the French cover girl that Hollywood wanted to turn into a movie star? On the New Orleans set of Walk on the Wild Side in 1961, her co-star Laurence Harvey had an idea. When one of her big scenes took an age to get right, Harvey told director Edward Dmytryk: “You’d better shoot it in the dark.”
The antipathy between the leading pair made for a miserable and much-delayed production, Harvey telling anyone who would listen that Capucine was only in the movie because its producer Charles Feldman was her agent, her responding that Harvey “wasn’t man enough” to play her lover, he firing back “perhaps if you were more of a woman, I would be more of a man… kissing you is like kissing the side of a beer bottle.”
If this back-and-forth sounds particularly like a bit of cinematic dialogue, there’s a reason. More than six decades on, we know that the man who complained that the woman wasn’t womanly enough and the woman who did the reverse were both bisexual and well-versed in all the subterfuge that an era of morality clauses demanded.
When filming on Walk on the Wild Side took place, Capucine was officially the fiance of Dirk Bogarde, sharing a home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, with the British actor and his manager Anthony “Tote” Forwood, who was Bogarde’s real lover. Meanwhile, she was serving up quotes like this for the press: “Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time”.
Looking at the pictures and the films now, we can see the cheekbones, the aquiline nose, the full lips, the icy stare. But who was the real Capucine?
We know that she was born Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre in 1927, in the south-eastern village of Saint-Raphaël. Depending on which account you believe – and Capucine was a deeply unreliable narrator – her parents were either completely disinterested or too strict and controlling. There are suggestions that Germaine may have spent the first two years of her life in medical institutions, either because of parental neglect or (according to wild rumours in the French press) that she was born intersex and needed a series of operations.
According to the established Capucine legend, it was while the 22-year-old Germaine Lefebvre was walking down a Parisian street that her life was forever changed. Instead of telling fashion photographer Henry Coste where to get off when he asked whether she would model for him, Germaine agreed to a photo session. No sooner were the pictures put in front of Hubert de Givenchy than the newly monikered Capucine – it means “nasturtium” – was the fashion house’s new face.
There’s little to suggest she cared much for the fashion world. Of more interest were the movie offers that came her way, on the back of which she became involved with the actor Pierre Trabaud. Married in early 1950, the pair would divorce within the year, the model refusing to accept Trabaud’s violence towards her. Alone again in the world, the bored but beautiful Capucine took herself to New York where the modelling work was better paid and you bumped into a better class of stranger.
The films were also bigger in America. After bit parts in European pictures and an eye-catching turn as Franz Liszt’s lover in the Bogarde picture Song Without End, Capucine was cast in the John Wayne vehicle North to Alaska; the start of her relationship with Feldman, who was also Wayne’s agent.
In taking on Capucine, Feldman let it be believed that he’d taken up with the stunning newcomer. He insisted she learn English – though this was not fully successful – and pushed other clients to work with his protege. And so Capucine starred in Walk on the Wild Side, played opposite William Holden in The Lion, and stood up to Rex Harrison in The Honey Pot.
In all of them, she looked stunning, but her performances were uneven. She was best at comedy, and excellent as Inspector Clouseau’s libidinous wife Simone in the first Pink Panther movie. She got on so well with Peter Sellers that they worked together again in What’s New Pussycat? Until his death in 1980, Capucine always referred to the notoriously temperamental actor as “a marvellous man.” The screen spouses had something in common: today, both would probably have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
If Capucine’s time at the top was limited, it was in part due to Feldman’s untimely death in 1968. Then there were Federico Fellini’s remarks upon casting her in Satyricon – “She has a face to launch a thousand ships… but she was born too late.” Her kind of elegance now less in demand, there remained a place in film and TV for Capucine but it tended to be thanks to old friends like Pink Panther co-star Robert Wagner, who cast her in an episode of Hart to Hart.
She bemoaned the lack of good parts for women over 40 but did not bear grudges – apart from one. Despite receiving a belated apology from her Walk on the Wild Side co-star she once said: “Of all the men I have worked with, John Wayne, Dirk Bogarde, William Holden… are my friends. But I hate Laurence Harvey! Write that down, please, write it! I hate him with a passion!”
The spotlight having moved away, Capucine made a life for herself in Lausanne, Switzerland, looking after her cats and spending time with an old friend from her modelling days, Audrey Hepburn. She was more open about her sexuality, telling an interviewer who asked if she would describe herself as heterosexual: “Oh, I wouldn’t. But if the publicity people would see a need to say that, I don’t care… most publicity is not true.”
The relative isolation of her new life gave the star ample time to contemplate the one obstacle she’d never been able to come to terms with, the bipolar disorder that had long threatened to claim her life and did exactly that on a March afternoon in 1990, with a deliberate fall from the balcony of her eighth-floor apartment.
A decade later, once Bogarde too had died, the BBC screened a documentary about his life. Home movie footage – presumably shot by Tote Forwood – shows Bogarde and Capucine on the terrace of their house in the home counties. Sometimes wooden on the big screen, here Capucine is wonderfully animated. Such is her joie de vivre, one almost forgets that this too is a performance.
But for someone whose life was often not what it appeared to be, it’s lovely to see that, at least from time to time, there were roles she clearly enjoyed playing.
