Feb. 16--The phrase "superficially superficial" sounds too clever by half, but it applies to a certain, rarified breed of screen actor.
Louis Jourdan was one of those actors. He died Saturday in Beverly Hills at the age of 93. He carried so much louche Continental baggage so easily: a voice both beautiful and menacing; big, melancholy eyes; lots of hair; and, usually, an air of amusement as well as detachment.
Jourdan was born in Marseille and raised in Cannes and later did his part for the French Resistance. A few years later David O. Selznick groomed him for Charles Boyer-type roles. To audiences of a certain age, Jourdan always will be best remembered for playing a Bond villain in "Octopussy" and a mad (yet classy) scientist in "Swamp Thing." Others will recall his blase, dryly authoritative turn in "Gigi," his second assignment for director Vincente Minnelli, the first being "Madame Bovary." Lesser known than "Gigi," "Madame Bovary" is by far the more interesting picture, and it came around the time Jourdan was proving his dramatic mettle in his adopted country.
It's always bittersweet to note an actor's finest hour arriving early in his career. For Jourdan, that hour came in 1948, the year after his English-language film debut in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Paradine Case." In Max Ophuls' "Letters From an Unknown Woman," Jourdan portrays an egocentric concert pianist who gives innocent, credulous Joan Fontaine a tumble and then forgets her. Or nearly: As the Fontaine character's life becomes a tragic testament to doomed ardor, the pianist's life (and Jourdan's beautifully modulated performance) reveal more and more of what lies beneath the man's superficial surfaces.
The "superficially superficial" line comes from another Ophuls film, the great (truly; it's great) "Earrings of Madame de..." Charles Boyer is the one who says it. When Jourdan had the good fortune to find the right directors, such as Ophuls and Minnelli, he used everything he had to captivate audiences -- not with charm, or high spirits, but a more ambiguous quality. His on-screen persona typically gravitated to the shadows. (Memorably, he played Dracula in the 1970s for BBC-TV.) He dismissed his own work in "Gigi" as a struggle to activate a "colorless leading man." In "Letters From an Unknown Woman," by contrast, you see it all, in a marvelous film: Jourdan the leading man, Jourdan the steely character actor, Jourdan the romantic ideal, proper, callow, superficially superficial yet full of secrets.
