Elvira Popescu (Elvire Popesco, May 10, 1894, Bucharest – December 11, 1993, Paris), famous Romanian stage and movie actress and theatre director. In the heyday of French popular cinema, people liked stories of princes and princesses set in the remote kingdoms of real or imaginary central and Eastern Europe. With her bubbly blonde beauty and strong accent, Elvire Popesco was the exotic queen of the genre, on stage and on screen.
Born Elvire Popescu (as an actress in France she called herself Popesco) in Bucharest, in 1894, into a theatrical family, she studied at Conservatorul de Artă Dramatică, under the guidance of Constantin Nottara and Aristizza Romanescu. She made her debut at the National Theatre Bucharest at age 16. In 1912, she played herself in the movie
Independenţa României, directed by Aristide Demetriade. In 1919 she became artistic director of the Excelsior Theatre. In 1921, Popescu started
Teatrul Mic (the Little Theatre), which she managed in parallel with the
Excelsior. In 1923, she starred in the movie
Ţigăncuşa de la iatac, directed by Alfred Halm. She married Aurel Athanasesco and had a daughter, Tatiana. After a few years, she divorced, and married Ion Manolescu-Strunga, Minister of Industry and Commerce (who was to die in Sighet prison in the 1950s). Her third husband was Count Maximilien Sébastien Foy (born in Paris on April 17, 1900, died in Neuilly sur Seine on November 11, 1967). Legend has it that King Ferdinand was madly in love with Popesco, a story which sounds just like one of her French plays, as does that of her Parisian debut. In 1923, the playwright Louis Verneuil asked her to take over the lead in his hit play
Ma Cousine de Varsovie. Popesco promptly came to Paris, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her triumph in
Ma Cousine de Varsovie (filmed in 1931) started a long personal relationship with Verneuil, and a longer professional one; on and off, she performed the play until 1955.
Popesco's genius was her ability to evoke both exoticism and typical high Parisian life. In the 1920s and 1930s, many Russian exiles lived and worked in Paris. With the flourishing 'Slav' cabarets and restaurants, they popularised the glittering nostalgic culture of the exiled aristocracy, a champagne- drinking world where women, however impoverished, had constant love affairs, and wore satin dresses and jewels - exactly Popesco's image on and off stage and screen. In this context, her exact origins did not matter. Her sophisticated looks and strong accent evoked white, aristocratic European otherness. At the same time, her comic talent was brilliantly suited to boulevard comedy. Her best films were adaptations of Verneuil's plays, such as
L'Habit vert (1937), Andre Berthomieu's
Eusebe deputé (1937, based on Tristan Bernard), Abel Gance's
Paradis perdu (1939), and Sacha Guitry's
Ils etaient neuf celibataires (1939), in which Guitry famously summed her up with the judgement '
She's not French, but she's a Parisienne'. Like many exiles in show business, she resented, but capitalised on, her stereotypical 'foreignness'; she was known as "Reine du Boulevard", "Notre Dame du Théâtre", "Monstre Sacré", etc.
Apart from small parts in Rene Clement's
Plein Soleil and Guitry's
Napoleon (both 1959), her film career was mostly confined to the 1930s filmed plays. She pursued a brilliant career in boulevard theatre, however, well into the - and her - Seventies (her sole tragic part was Jocasta in Cocteau's
La Machine infernale in 1954). Andre Roussin's
La Mamma, written for her in 1957, and which she played until 1974, was her last triumph; she went back on tour with it in 1982. She crowned her theatrical career as director of the
Theatre de Paris, and later the
Theatre Marigny.
Elvire Popesco was awarded the
Legion d'Honneur in 1970, graduating to the higher rank of
Commandeur in 1989. In 1987, Elvira Popescu received the
Molière Prize for career achievements. She died in Paris at age 99, and was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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