Foreign Affairs

The siren’s song of Hollywood has lured many an Old World luminary to the seductive trappings of Tinseltown, several of whom found enduring stardom in American cinema. Sure, you have Italy’s Sophia Loren, France’s Charles Boyer, Sweden’s Ingrid Bergman, Austria’s Maxmilian Schell, Germany’s Nastassja Kinski, and Spain’s Antonio Banderas, all of whom embellished their international careers in a number of U.S. films - not to mention Gerard Depardieu (above), the hulking Gaul who just would not go away in the 1990s (see "Green Card," "My Father the Hero," "Bogus") - but the spotlight in our moviehouse shines on those overseas thespians who made rare, sometimes unforgettable appearances on the domestic screen before abruptly packing their luggage and catching the next flight home.

Here, then, are our nominations for Best Performance in an American Film by a European Actor (No Brits Allowed) Who Subsequently Turned Their Back on Hollywood and Returned Home…

Yves Montand, the epitome of the debonair, heartbreaking French screen idol, was not French. Born Ivo Livi in 1921, his parents were left-wing Italian peasants who brought him to France in 1923, two years before the rise of Facism and Mussolini. As an apprentice hairdresser, he won a competition in Marseilles at age 16. At 17, he changed his name to Yves Montand and began a singing career in music halls, briefly interrupted by employment as a shipyard laborer.

After a singing performance at the famed Moulin Rouge in 1944, he was "discovered" by the legendary chanteuse Edit Piaf, who became his mentor, as well as lover. He made his film debut in 1946 in "Etoile sans lumiere" ("Star Without Light"), costarring Piaf.

Montand’s star-making role in the 1953 French cult classic "The Wages of Fear" defined his charismatic virility, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that he was able to express his leftist views in such films as "The War Is Over," directed by Alain Resnais, and a series of political thrillers by director Costa-Gavras, including "Z," "The Confession" and "State of Siege."

In 1960, Montand went to Hollywood to star with Marilyn Monroe in "Let’s Make Love," a forgettable musical comedy costarring Tony Randall with cameos by Gene Kelly, Bing Crosby and Milton Berle, directed by George Cukor ("The Philadelphia Story," "Born Yesterday," "A Star Is Born"). Monroe was coming off the success and critical acclaim of "Bus Stop" and "Some Like It Hot," but she, along with Montand and Cukor, was disappointed with this featherweight fluff, although it did bring Montand international attention. The production was complicated by an affair between Montand, married at the time to actress Simone Signoret, and Monroe, whose then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller, revised the movie’s script to give his wife more attention.

The following year, Montand found himself cast as a lustful southern bootlegger in 1920s Mississippi in "Sanctuary," a steamy melodrama based on the writings of William Faulkner. In a cast that included Lee Remick, Bradford Dillman and renowned folk singer Odetta, Montand’s character became a Cajun, if only to excuse his French accent.

In 1966, Montand received the Hollywood red carpet treatment when he portrayed a doomed driver in "Grand Prix," an epic celebration of Formula One racing, directed by Hollywood’s reigning wunderkind, John Frankenheimer, revered by fans for spectacular, real-time action sequences (filmed decades before computer-generated technology), faulted only for the off-track soap opera embroiling the international cast of Americans James Garner and Eva Marie Saint, Brit Brian Bedford, Italian Antonio Sabato, and French Francoise Hardy.

Incidentally, the worldly cast included the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune (famous for his roles in a number of samurai sagas directed by Akira Kurosawa), who ended up having his dialogue re-dubbed by Paul Frees, a voice-over artist and cartoon vocal talent best known for his work as Disney’s Professor Ludwig Von Drake and as Boris Badenov in the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows. A decade after "Grand Prix," Mifune was cast as Admiral Yamamoto in the World War II drama "Midway," only to suffer the same fate by being again re-dubbed by Frees, because the producers thought Mifune sounded too Japanese!

Montand had one more flirtation with Hollywood, in the 1970 screen musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," starring Barbra Streisand and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Produced during the death throes of the big-budget musical, the romantic fantasy found Montand playing a psychiatrist who becomes haplessly enamored with Streisand’s past life, prompting The New York Times critic Vincent Canby to note, "It’s apparently Montand’s fate to be emasculated by big Hollywood actresses, and his role is largely that of a line-carrier for Streisand."

In the late 1970s, Montand came under attack in Soviet media when he abruptly shifted his political stance from leftist to right of center. A few years before he died of a heart attack at age 70 in 1991, he gave what many believe his richest performances, as the patriarch Cesar Soubeyran (below) in films based on two novels by Marcel Pagnol, "Jean de Florette" and "Manon of the Springs."

Fernando Rey was born Fernando Casado D’Arambillet in Spain in 1917 ("Rey" was his mother’s second surname). He was an architecture student when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. His father, who fought as a Loyalist against General Francisco Franco, was condemned to death, although the sentence was eventually suspended. As his family’s finances dwindled, he found employment as a movie extra. He also dubbed dialogue for imported films into Spanish, often as the voice of Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart and Tyrone Power.

Rey’s breakthrough screen role came in "Vindiana" (1961), his first work with director Luis Bunuel, a filmmaker famed for his uniquely iconoclastic, often surreal vision. In the 1970s, Rey again collaborated with Bunuel for "Tristana," "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire." Rey’s trademark goatee lent him an identifiable air of dignity that suited a variety of roles, from world-weary aristocrats to corrupt cynics to humble priests.

It was, in fact, a sympathetic priest that Rey portrayed in "Return of the Seven," the lackluster 1966 sequel to the classic western "The Magnificent Seven." In 1969, Rey played a sympathetic revolutionary in yet another sequel, "Guns of the Magnificent Seven."

Rey’s best known American movie performance was in "The French Connection" (1971) as debonair drug kingpin Alain ("Frog One") Charnier (below), although the Spanish-born actor did not speak English, and his French was rudimentary at best.

Rey appeared in approximately 200 films. In his later years, before his death in 1994, he preferred working in his homeland. Among his many honors and awards was the gold medal of the Spanish Movie Arts and Sciences Academy.

Marthe Keller, born in Switzerland in 1945, had childhood hopes of becoming a ballerina, but when a skiing accident at age 16 scuttled her dreams, she turned her creative interest to acting. She studied, trained and honed her craft in German schools and German stages and TV productions. One of her earlier screen appearances was an uncredited part in the 1966 spy thriller "Funeral in Berlin," starring Michael Caine. After moving to France in the late ‘60s, she established herself in a number of films, notably as three generations of the same family in director Claude Lelouch’s "Toute une vie" ("And Now My Love") (1974).

It wasn’t long before Hollywood called, and she was cast as Dustin Hoffman’s duplicitous lover in director John Schlesinger’s nihilistic thriller "Marathon Man" (1976). The Golden Globe-nominated role was followed the next year by a memorable performance as a Palestinian terrorist in "Black Sunday," a crackerjack action picture directed by John Frankenheimer ("Grand Prix"). Also in 1977, Keller portrayed Al Pacino’s love interest in "Bobby Deerfield," a melodrama played out in the arena of auto racing that misfired, despite any sparks created by the stars’ off-screen romance.

Keller’s Hollywood honeymoon was over by the time she starred in "Fedora" (1978), director Billy Wilder’s ill-advised attempt to rework his 1950 classic "Sunset Boulevard." 1980’s "The Formula," a turgid political potboiler touted for its (ultimately disappointingly dull) clash of acting titans George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, found Keller doing a lifeless incarnation of her "Marathon Man" and "Black Sunday" roles.

Not surprisingly, Keller returned to Europe. Her active career in theater and film has been complemented by an avid interest in classical music as a performer of spoken parts and as an opera director. Her debut as director at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera was a 2004 presentation of Mozart’s "Don Giovanni." In 2001, she made her Tony Award-nominated acting debut on Broadway in "Judgment at Nuremberg."

Terence Hill, best known to moviegoers as the blue-eyed star of the comedic Spaghetti Westerns "They Call Me Trinity" (1971), "Trinity Is STILL My Name!" (1972), and "My Name Is Nobody" (1973) was born Mario Girotti in 1939 in Venice. His father was an Italian chemist, his mother was German. In 1951, he had his first film role at 12. Over the subsequent years, he appeared in numerous motion pictures, among them sand-and-sandal epics, German-produced westerns and Spaghetti Westerns, many of which costarred his burly friend, Bud Spencer (born Carlo Pedersoli in Naples).

When he starred in the Italian Western "God Forgives…I Don’t!" (1968), he changed his name, on the studio’s insistence, to Terence Hill. "I was given a list with 20 names and 24 hours to choose from it," he later recalled. "I chose the name Terence Hill because it appealed to me, and also because the name has the same initials as my mother."

His American film debut came in 1977 in "Mr. Billion," an innocuous, lighthearted reworking of Frank Capra’s "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," costarring Jackie Gleason, Valerie Perrine and Slim Pickens. "March or Die" (1977), an unashamed homage to rousing Foreign Legion adventures of yore, was elevated by a cast of heavyweight talent, including Gene Hackman, Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow and Ian Holm, slam-bang battle sequences and an evocatively old-fashioned music score by Maurice Jarre.

Hill’s two American movies, however, did not result in the stateside stardom some had banked on, and Hill found consistently more stable employment on the home side of the Atlantic. He underwent a period of depression following the death of adopted son Ross in 1990. After his recovery, he discovered newfound fame in the Italian TV series "Don Matteo" (2000-2008), starring as a crime-solving parish priest (below).

Finally, our winner for Best Performance in an American Film by a European Actor (No Brits Allowed) Who Subsequently Turned Their Back on Hollywood and Returned Home is…Gastone Moschin. Rightfully, this prompts the query, "Who the hell is Gastone Moschin?"

Moschin was born 1929 in San Giovanni Lupatoto in the Province of Verona in Italy and began his long, prolific acting career in the 1950s on the stage in Genoa and Milan. During that same period, he started appearing in motion pictures, which led, as well, to several television roles, including a number of appearances on the previously mentioned "Don Matteo" series, starring Terence Hill.

In 1974, Moschin made an indelible mark in American cinema as Don Fanucci, a neighborhood crime boss and extortionist in 1917 New York City’s Little Italy, in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece "The Godfather Part II." Although he didn’t speak a word of English, Moschin, in a mere handful of scenes, depicted a menacing evil so charmingly charismatic (particularly when he admonishes a sidewalk Punch and Judy puppet show with a dismissive wave of his hand and the phrase, "Oh, this is too violent for me!") that we felt a tinge of sympathy when he was gunned down by young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), rending his own garments like an anguished Old Testament patriarch.