Leslie Caron

Leslie Caron was born in 1931 near Paris, France, to a French father and an American mother who had herself been a dancer, and trained rigorously in ballet from childhood, joining the Ballet des Champs-Élysées as a teenager. She was discovered there by Gene Kelly, who cast her opposite himself in An American in Paris (1951), her film debut, which made her an international star at nineteen. She followed with a run of MGM musicals built around her dancing, most notably Lili (1953), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and Gigi (1958), directed by Vincente Minnelli. In 1964 she starred opposite Cary Grant in Father Goose, a wartime comedy-adventure in which Grant played a boozy beachcomber recruited as a coastal lookout who is joined by Caron's stranded French schoolteacher and her young charges; the film won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Caron actively sought to move beyond musicals into dramatic work, succeeding notably in The L-Shaped Room (1962), for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress and received a further Academy Award nomination, playing a pregnant, unmarried woman in a London boarding house. She continued working in film, television, and theatre across subsequent decades, including work in France, and later wrote two volumes of memoir. Caron remains active into her nineties as one of the last surviving major stars of the classic MGM musical era. She is remembered both as the ballet-trained ingenue who defined a genre and as an actress who successfully reinvented herself in serious drama once the musical era faded.