Suzy Delair

Suzy Delair was, from the end of the 1940s through the early '60s, one of the hottest French stars and personalities on the international film scene. A stunningly attractive woman with a saucy screen persona, she was equally good at comedy and drama — ironically, before emerging as a screen star, she had been a cabaret singer for many years, and it was in the role of an entertainer, as Jenny Lamour in the 1947 Henri-Georges Clouzot thriller Quai des Orfèvres (titled Jenny Lamour for U.S. release) that she emerged to international stardom. The following year, she enjoyed a huge hit in France with "Avec Son Tra-La-La," but by then her movie career had taken off as well, and she effectively split her time between the two careers for the next 15 years or so, working with comedic actors such as Laurel & Hardy in their promising but disappointing swan song Atol K (aka Utopia)(1950) and Fernandel in Fernandel the Dressmaker (1956), and cutting an equally memorable figure in dramas such as Gervaise that same year. She kept her hand in music sufficiently to generate a very full CD's worth of cabaret songs and also to make it onto at least one classical song compilation.