American screen legend Gary Cooper (1901-1961) is well remembered for his stoic, understated acting style in more than one hundred Westerns, comedies and dramas. He received five Oscar nominations and won twice for his roles as Alvin York in Sergeant York (1941) and as Will Kane in High Noon (1952).
Spanish singer and actress Sara Montiel (1928) is also known as Sarita Montiel and Saritísima. She is still a much-loved and internationally known name in the Spanish-speaking cinema. In the late 1950’s, Montiel achieved the status of mega-star in Europe and Latin America with El Último Cuple/The Last Torch Song (1957). This film and La Violetera/The Violet Peddler (1958) netted the highest gross revenues ever recorded for films made in the Spanish speaking film industry. She was the first woman to distill sex openly in Spanish cinema at a time when even a low cut dress was not acceptable.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, singer and actor Denise Darcel (1924-2011) starred in a string of Hollywood films. Americans knew her as the sultry ‘French Bombshell’. Later she worked as a game show host, a striptease artiste and a casino dealer in Las Vegas. Indeed, ooh-la-la!
Fame came to American film legend Burt Lancaster (1913-1994) with his first film role, as the doomed Swede in Universal’s The Killers (1946), but the former circus acrobat knew better than to leave his career in other hands. After less than two years in Hollywood, Lancaster formed his own production company and took the lead in such popular successes as the Technicolor swashbucklers The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952), and the Western Vera Cruz (1954). The athletic, savvy but passionate Lancaster remained a box office draw for 20 years, winning a 1961 Academy Award for playing the corrupt evangelist Elmer Gantry (1960). His best work through the next decades was often in European features like Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo/The Leopard (1963) and Gruppo di famiglia in un interno/Conversation Piece (1974), Novecento/1900 (1976) and Atlantic City (1980), which netted him an Oscar nomination.
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