With classic patrician features and an independent, non-conformist personality, Capucine began her film debut in 1949 at the age of 21 with an appearance in the film Rendezvous in July (1949). She attended school in France and received a BA degree in foreign languages. Married for six months in her early twenties, she never remarried. In 1957, she...
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Star Sign
Capricorn
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Quote
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Men look at me like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents.
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Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time. I find him demanding and aloof--so I must do all in my power to interest him.
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Men spoil women in America. A woman needs to know that the man is her master.
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Fact
1
Dirk Bogarde said that she was the only woman he had ever considered marrying.
2
Remained a close friend of Dirk Bogarde, her co-star in Song Without End (1960), and often visited him at his home in France.
3
In 1952 she got a two-week job modeling clothes in fashion shows aboard a French cruise ship. She shared a cabin with a 17-year-old dancer working in the chorus of the ship's "nightclub"--Brigitte Bardot.
4
On a certain Wednesday in 1956, she realized she was bored. Having never been to America, she flew there on Friday. She modeled in New York for a while, and one night at the Manhattan restaurant le Pavilion she met star John Wayne and agent/producer Charles K. Feldman. Feldman signed her to a contract (she later moved in with him) and sent her to California to learn English. She made her English-speaking debut as Princess Carolyne in Song Without End (1960).
Her French bourgeois family wanted her to become a school teacher. When she balked at that, they suggested she work in a bank.
7
At 21 she met her spouse on the set of the 1949 film Rendez-vous de juillet (1949) (her first screen appearance) and married him the following year. The marriage lasted six months.
8
She was born in Saumur, France, the same small town on the Loire as one of her famous patrons from her modeling days, Coco Chanel.
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Considered one of the great beauties of Europe.
10
She was a witness to the 1969 wedding of longtime friend Audrey Hepburn to Dr. Andrea Dotti in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she lived for many years until her death.
11
Had a two-year relationship with actor William Holden, who was married at the time.
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Nickname to close friends was "Cap".
13
Born Germain Lefebvre, she took the stage name "Capucine" during her modeling days. The name--pronounced "Kap-oo-seen"--is French for the Nasturtium flower.
14
Died in Lausanne, Switzerland, after jumping from her eighth-story apartment.
15
When she committed suicide in March 1990 at the age of 62, her obituary in the New York Times stated that her only known survivors were her three cats.
16
She was a longtime friend of Audrey Hepburn, the two having met while modeling in Paris in the late 1940s. A manic-depressive, Capucine's life had on several occasions been saved by her friend (both women lived at the time in Switzerland) after repeated suicide attempts.
17
According to rumor, she was remembered in the wills of William Holden (to the tune of $50,000) and Peter Sellers as well as that of 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck.
$5 Million
