For generations of film and theatre audiences, Charles Boyer was
the archetypal Frenchman - cultured, courteous, seductive, yet
never quite at home in a culture not his own. Even his murmuring
baritone voice echoed that loss, giving him the very essence of
romance. While one might have expected that the real-life Boyer was
a playboy and serial seducer, in reality, he was intensely private,
thoughtful, and fidelitous in love - and very professionally
astute. The Great Lover is the first biography of Boyer to exist in
English in almost forty years. In an insightful analysis of Boyer's
choice of roles during and after World War II, author John Baxter
reveals how Boyer, realizing his accent would always mark him as an
outsider, both embraced and subverted that identity. Baxter relates
how Boyer established himself in the theatre and cinema of France,
confidently transitioning from silent film to sound and making a
name for himself as a romantic leading man in Hollywood through the
early 1940s. During World War II, Boyer put his career on hold to
become politically active on behalf of his occupied home country.
Upon returning to acting, Baxter shows how Boyer adapted
effortlessly to postwar character roles in both Europe and the
United States. He entered television in the 1950s as producer and
performer, and then remade himself as a comedy performer in the
1960s. A four-time Academy Award nominee, he was honored by the
Academy only once for his activities on behalf of France during
World War II. Far from clinging to the performances that made him
famous, Boyer showed a readiness to break the mold. Yet above all,
Baxter argues that Boyer's greatest achievement lies in being the
embodiment of exiles everywhere.
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