Last night while scanning with the remote control I landed on Cinema 13, which was running Algiers (1938), starring Charles Boyer as a thief and the exquisite Hedy Lamarr as the femme fatale. It's a remake of the innovative French classic Pepe le Moko (1937). The film is best known for a quote that was not used in it: "Come with me to the Casbah." That was a product of comics lampooning Boyer, which the actor hated. According to filmsite.org, it was voiced by Pepe LePew in Looney Tunes cartoons. Anyway, the shunned woman in Algiers was played by someone unfamiliar to me, Sigrid Gurie, who was born in Brooklyn in 1911. Her family moved to Norway the next year, and there she remained until discovered by Samuel Goldwyn, who brought her to the USA in 1936. That's her in character in the above photo. She has only 14 credits under her name at IMDb, some in TV, the last in 1951. There was a big to-do when the press found out she was born in Brooklyn, not Europe. Goldwyn turned on her, which seems silly, as she was in Norway from the age of one to her mid 30's. She had a twin brother who, according to her bio, treated her cruelly. Knut Haukelid was a WWII hero of the Norwegian underground. The Heroes of Telemark (1965), starring Richard Harris, was based on his exploits, although they changed his name to Straud for the movie. Sigrid married and divorced three times. She became a talented artist. In 1969 at the age of 58, she succumbed to an embolism while living in Mexico. When her brother found out, he suffered an embolism himself, but survived and lived until 1994. There are several beautiful landscapes on her google photo page, but there was no attribution to her on any. Here's a painting that had it:
What was playing on the radio in the bagel shop? - Baby It's Cold Outside, which has recently been attacked by leftists. I chuckled. No one complained.
Fortunately, there were no parking spots available near the scaffold, which had me shunning the temptation to open the floating book shop on this rainy day. I tended to chores, read and did a crossword puzzle. I also found some old photographs that may bring smiles to the the faces of the subjects. I will post one every Thursday at Facebook for about two months.
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