Fifty six years before Denzel Washington, the recipient of our Cecil B. deMille Award 2016, Maurice Chevalier held the very same trophy. On March 5, 1959, Chevalier was honored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with a Cecil B deMille at the Cocoanut Grove, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, in celebration of a career that had started in France and had made an easy transition to Hollywood, with a debut in 1928, when he signed a contract with Paramount, and became a popular star of American musicals. In 1957 he starred with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon by Billy Wilder, in 1958 with Leslie Caron in Gigi by Vincent Minnelli.
Here he is with Susan Kohner, who won a Golden Globe Most promising Newcomer, while actor Edward G. Robinson looks on. Kohner would go on to a long career that included The Gene Krupa Story, All Fine Young Cannibals and Douglas Sirk’s masterful Imitation of Life.
Elisa Leonelli, Ana Maria Bahiana