Maurice Chevalier

Maurice Chevalier was a French actor, singer, and entertainer born in the working-class Ménilmontant district of Paris in 1888 and died in the same city in 1972. The youngest of nine children of a house painter and a lacemaker, he left school at eleven and tried his hand at acrobatics before finding his footing on the café-concert and music-hall stages of Paris.

By his early twenties Chevalier was a leading attraction at the Folies Bergère, where he partnered with the singer Mistinguett, and during the First World War he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans, learning English from a fellow captive. That language eventually carried him to Hollywood, where Paramount signed him in 1928 to lead early sound musicals such as The Love Parade (1929) and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

His tilted straw boater, jutting lower lip, and warm Parisian accent became his trademarks, and his recordings of Louise, Mimi, and Valentine sold widely on both sides of the Atlantic. After the Second World War, during which his conduct under the Vichy regime drew sharp criticism, he rebuilt his reputation through one-man shows and a return to American films.

In 1958 he co-starred in Vincente Minnelli's Gigi, performing Thank Heaven for Little Girls and I Remember It Well, and the same year the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar for his contributions to entertainment. He continued to perform into his eighties and published several volumes of memoirs.

The name Maurice comes from the Late Latin Mauritius, derived from Maurus, meaning a Moor or dark-skinned person. Carried into French through the cult of Saint Maurice of the Theban Legion, the name became a steady favorite in working-class Paris of the late nineteenth century. He wore it as the very sound of the boulevards.