The famous La Marseillaise scene from Casablanca.

[muriel_volestrangler]

33. Michael Carlson: Homage to Madeleine LeBeau (2016)

It’s one of the most memorable close-ups in film: Madeleine LeBeau, as Yvonne, tears streaming down her face, shouts ‘Vive La France!’ after joining the patrons of Rick’s Café Americain in the ‘Marseillaise’ to drown out the Nazis’ singing of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’. LeBeau died on 1 May, at the age of 92; she was the last surviving cast member of Casablanca.

LeBeau and her husband, Marcel Dalio, had fled Paris ahead of the Nazi invasion. Like Victor and Ilsa, they obtained letters of transit from Spain to Lisbon, where they boarded a Portugese ship. Their Chilean visas turned out to be forgeries and they were stopped in Vera Cruz, Mexico. But they managed to get temporary visas for Canada, and on their way north stopped in Los Angeles.

Dalio was a major actor in France; a comic star who played serious roles in La Règle du jeu and La Grande Illusion. LeBeau met him when she was a teenage stage actress. They married in 1939, the year she landed her first small file role, in Pabst’s Young Girls in Trouble. Dalio was more than twenty years older (a prefiguring of Humphrey Bogart’s romance with Lauren Bacall, which began on the set of To Have and Have Not, in which Dalio had one of his best Hollywood roles). Dalio was born Israel Moshe Blauschild to Romanian Jewish parents; the Nazis used his face on anti-Semitic posters. Though he escaped, Dalio’s parents died in concentration camps.

Both Dalio and Lebeau landed work in Hollywood: he got character roles and she worked her way up with smaller parts in better films at Warner Bros: Hold Back the Dawn with Charles Boyer, and in Raoul Walsh’s boxing drama Gentleman Jim. By the time they made Casablanca, the marriage had already failed to survive Hollywood; Dalio sued for divorce on grounds of desertion.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2016/may/homage-to-madeleine-lebeau

(Mike Carlson is British TV's resident American Football expert; a TV sports producer, he moved to the UK many years ago. But he has a great 'hinterland', and also writes about movies, and does some obituaries for The Guardian about American actors and similar)