Cécile Aubry

Cécile Aubry (3 August 1928 – 19 July 2010) was a French film actress, author, television screenwriter and director. Born Anne-José Madeleine Henriette Bénard, Aubry began her career as a dancer. At age 20, she was signed to 20th Century Fox. She made her break as the star of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Manon (1949), which won the Golden Lion at the famed Venice Film Festival. That brought her a leading role alongside Tyrone Power and Orson Welles in American director Henry Hathaway's feature The Black Rose (1950). She had a strong performance in Christian-Jacque's Bluebeard (1952), one of the first French-produced films to be made in color. For a short time, she was a Hollywood success, signing a lucrative contract with Fox, employing her parents as a publicity team, and regularly appearing in French film magazines as an example of the perfect hybrid of Franco-American femininity.