Louis Jourdan, Star of ‘Octopussy,’ ‘Gigi,’ Dies at 93

Louis Jourdan, who crafted a Hollywood acting career in the footsteps of fellow dapper Frenchmen Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer and is best remembered for the musical “Gigi” and as the villain in James Bond pic “Octopussy,” has died at 93. According to his friend and biographer Olivier Minne, he died Saturday at his home in Beverly Hills. Succeeding Charles Boyer as Hollywood’s favorite French lover, Jourdan romanced Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine in films during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. He also showed that he could play a villain in “Julie” (1956), in which he was Doris Day’s husband, a psychopathic killer.

He was the last French figure of the Hollywood golden age. And he worked with so many of the greatest actors and directors.

Biographer Olivier Minne

During the German occupation of France, he was forced into a labor gang, cutting wood and digging ditches. Assigned to make propaganda films for the Nazis, he escaped and joined the French underground. Jourdan remained unsentimental about his movies, claiming in 1985 that he never watched them: “When they’re on television, I click them away. Hollywood created an image, and I long ago reconciled myself to it. I was the French cliche.”

Entertainment Jourdan