New Faces: Les Girls

In Europe, 1964 promises to go down as a rare vintage year for movie actresses. The new Sylvas, Sophies and Sentas not only have body; they show as well the promise of potential fame. Individually, they are as dissimilar as Chianti, Burgundy and Liebfraumilch. What they have in common is training, intelligence and talent. They can act.

Italy’s Stefania Sandrelli, 18, is an actress right down to her toes. Her unforgettable game of footsie with a handsome sailor in the closing scenes of Divorce—Italian Style led to her being cast in the sequel, Seduced and Abandoned. Rosanna Schiaffino, 25, whose Lollobridgework went from a small part in La Notte Bravo, to The Victors and The Long Ships, is married to Producer Alfredo Bini. He will have to produce a lot to finance Rosanna. Says she: “I am a very expensive girl. My husband will have to give me a houseful of servants if he wants a hot dinner and clean clothes now and then.”

Tall, shapely Virna Lisi, 27, has a non-Latin look that appeals to Italian fans and will be sampled by U.S. audiences when she appears with Jack Lemmon in How to Murder Your Wife, her first Hollywood film. Sylva (38-26-38) Koscina, 27, is another tall, cool one, a Yugoslav by birth, who came on strong in Joseph Levine’s muscle opera, Hercules, and keeps the paparazzi popping by strolling around in skintight black leather ski pants.

Golden Girl. Another hidebound type is Britain’s strapping Honor Blackman, 37, who became celebrated for the array of leather suits, jackets, trench coats and boots that she sported in a Freudian private-eye TV series called The Avengers. As a result, so many women demanded leather garments in Britain that the price of shoes went up. Honor plays Pussy Galore, the leather-sheathed leader of an Amazonian flying circus, in Goldfinger, the new James Bond thriller. Another face from Britain in Goldfinger belongs to Shirley Eaton, 27, blonde alumna of endless Carry On . . . comedies. No leather for Shirley: she appears once in a startling sort of bathing-suitless strap, later gets gold-plated from head to toe. “I end up dead,” she says, “looking like an Oscar statue.”

The German-speaking Sexbombes are a persevering, single-minded breed. Typical of her fetching generation is Senta Berger, 23, a former student at the Max Reinhardt Institute in Vienna, who played hooky from school to do a tiny bit in The Journey with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, went on to play in The Victors, and stars with Charlton Heston in Major Dundee. Israel’s Dahlia Lavi, 21, learned to dance in Sweden, has made films in France, had her first U.S. movie role in Two Weeks in Another Town, with Kirk Douglas. Lavi, who speaks English, Swedish, French, Hebrew, Italian and Arabic, learned Chinese and Cambodian for her role in the movie of Conrad’s Lord Jim with Peter O’Toole.

In France, the post-Bardot girls all seem to be homebodies. Gallic fan magazines pose them indefatigably in décolleté aprons, cooking or warming baby bottles.

> Sophie Daumier, 27, lives with her ten-year-old son Philippe (“His father? Bah, a boy who wasn’t worth marrying”) and Actor Guy Bedos. A onetime toe dancer, she made ten films before last year’s Dragées au Poivre (Sweet and Sour) established Sophie as “the most exuberant comic of the Nouvelle Vague.” The latest Bedos-Daumier hit, Aimez-Vous les Femmes?, is a comedy about cannibalism; the piece de resistance is Sophie au naturel.

> Catherine Deneuve, 20, was known all over France when she was 18 as the Folle Twistante because of her appearance in a movie with guitar-swacking Johnny Hallyday. But then Svengali Roger Vadim snared her, paled her complexion, and hollowed out her cheeks for his modern-dress version of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, which he called Le Vice et La Vertu. She played Vertu. Catherine presented Vadim with a son, Christian, before he left her for a new Trilby, U.S. Actress Jane Fonda. Catherine holds no grudge against Vadim (“I have my Christian, my Vadim in miniature”) and clings to the image he created for her.

> Francoise (38-23-36) Dorléac, 22, Deneuve’s vivacious sister, has a funny-bone that suggests a blend of Carole Lombard and Kay Kendall. Her body is long and sinewy, and she prances when she walks, but her hair is her fortune. It covers her face like a sheep dog’s, gets in her mouth when she talks, floats in her own prop wash as she capers ahead of That Man from Rio. Showing no face at all, only hair, she read for the lead in the Paris production of Gigi in 1960. She got the part, and Dorléac was a name.

> Catherine Spaak, 19, is a lithe, wide-eyed, legal-age Lolita type who calls Belgium’s Foreign Minister Oncle Paul Henri. She got her start at 15 in Carlo Ponti’s The Adolescents, recently taught herself English to appear in The Empty Canvas with Horst Buchholz and Bette Davis. Catherine recently finished a remake of La Ronde in Paris, then circled back to Rome to start work on Three Nights of Love.

In the U.S., the mid-’60s has seen the decline of the sex goddess as a type, and Hollywood seems not to care about cultivating any more. One reason perhaps is that young American actresses would rather be considered serious than seductive. Europe by contrast, is burgeoning with girls who know how to be both—and have to be for the Continent’s beloved bedroom operas. Ironically, the immense increase in U.S. moviemaking abroad has given Europe’s New Wave actresses an unparalleled opportunity to win fame in big-budget, internationally distributed films.