Biography
Born on 1 July 1931 in Paris, France, Leslie Caron established herself as an elegant, captivating presence in both acting and dance. Her mother, Margaret Petit, worked as an American ballet dancer, while her father, Claude Caron, ran a prosperous pharmacy in the city as a wealthy chemist. The family’s comfortable existence ended with the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. Despite the loss of their fortune, Caron continued ballet lessons and received a ballet titled La Rencontre created expressly for her. At 17 she joined the Ballet des Champs Elysées as a professional dancer and was noticed by Gene Kelly, who returned to Paris a year later to audition her for An American In Paris. She accepted the ingenue part opposite him in Vincente Minnelli’s film, which received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Subsequent roles came in Lili, where she and Mel Ferrer performed the song ‘Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo’, The Glass Slipper, Daddy Long Legs, and Gigi. By the time she appeared in the multi-Oscar winner Gigi, Caron was 27 and a mother yet kept her fresh, gamine image intact. Two years after her first marriage to George Hormel, heir to the American Span fortune, ended in 1954, she married British stage director Peter Hall. Although Hall discouraged her from acting, she performed in several stage and screen dramas between musicals, among them Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine for the RSC in 1961. A relationship with actor Warren Beatty ended her marriage to Hall in 1965; the couple lived together in the United States for two years. Her third marriage, to American film producer Michael Laughlin, lasted seven years. During the 1960s Caron returned to films, receiving acclaim for her dramatic work in The L-Shaped Room and appearing with Cary Grant in Father Goose, though none were musicals. She resides mainly in Paris and New York and continues stage work, sometimes in plays of her own. In 1982 she published the short-story collection Vengeance. In 1991 she learned German to portray the fading ballerina Grushinskaya in a stage production of Grand Hotel. In 1993 she opened her own restaurant in the Burgundy town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, seventy-five miles from Paris, after restoring a cluster of dilapidated thirteenth-century houses over five years. Toward the end of the decade she spent time in Britain and, in 1997, played the French writer George Sand in Nocturne For Lovers at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre. She also provided the voice of Saint-Sébastien for Debussy’s Le Martyre De Saint Sébastien, performed at the Barbican by the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. A year later she joined other former MGM stars in a London Palladium salute to the Magnificent Golden Years Of Musicals and received the Order du Merite, which joined the Legion d’Honneur awarded to her by President Mitterand five years earlier.