Background
Chevalier, Maurice was born on September 12, 1888 in Paris. Son of Victor Charles and Josephine (Vanden-Boosche) Chevalier.
Chevalier, Maurice was born on September 12, 1888 in Paris. Son of Victor Charles and Josephine (Vanden-Boosche) Chevalier.
Educated schools in Paris.
Chevalier was a café singer in the early years of this century and became partner and lover to Mistinguett at the Folies Bergère. All the more pity, therefore, that his experience of uninhibited, erotic entertainment was abandoned in favor of a grinning and not very convincing sexual knowingness. In his defense, it should be said that Chevalier was irked by the ineffable gay Parisian Paramount thrust upon him. But what he wanted to put in its place is not clear. He was a vast, popular success in Paris in the 1920s and went on to England and America.
MGM tested but declined him; Paramount saw the test and signed him. His first film was Innocents of Paris (29, Richard Wallace). In his next. The Love Parade (29, Ernst Lubitseh), the presence of Jeanette MacDonald— a very smart lad)'—helped to emphasize his bawdiness, which was well suited to Lubitseh s coy humor. After that, he made The Big Pond (30, Hobart Henley), The Playboy of Paris (30, Ludwig Berger), The Smiling Lieutenant (31, Lubitseh), and with MacDonald once more, One Hour with You (32, George Cukor). He was most at home in that crazy concoction Love Me Tonight (32, Rouben Mamoulian), wooing MacDonald in rhyming dialogue and excelling in the “Poor Apache " routine. But after two dull Norman Tau- rog films—A Bedtime Story (33) and The Way To Love (33)—Paramount let him go to MGM. There he made The Merry Widow (34, Lubitseh), still an attendant to MacDonald, and Folies Bergère (35, Roy del Ruth).
Discarded again, he went back to France and made L'Homme du Jour (35, Julien Duvivier) and Avec le Sourire (36, Maurice Tourneur). In England, he was in The Beloved Vagabond (36, Curtis Bernhardt) and Break the News (37, René Clair).
Just before the war, in France, he made Pièges (39, Robert Siodmak). He made no films during the war, and when there were suggestions that he had collaborated Chevalier appeared in a newsreel to clear himself. His next film was his best piece of acting, a rare hint of depth as the film director in Le Silence est d'Or (47, Clair). He made another three films in France over the next eight years, but was recalled to screen fame by Hollywood as a sort of male duenna with a leer face-lifted into a smile: Love in the Afternoon (57, Billy Wilder); Gigi (58, Vincente Minnelli); Count Your Blessings (59, Jean Negulesco); Pepe (59, George Sidney); Can-Can (60, Walter Lang); A Breath of Scandal (60, Michael Curtiz); Fanny (61, Joshiia Logan); Jessica (62, Negulesco); In Search of the Castaways (62, Robert Stevenson); A New Kind of Love (63, Melville Shavelson); I 'd Rather Be Rich (64, Jack Smight); Panic Button (64, George Sherman); and Monkeys Go Home (66, Andrew V. McLaglen).
Served in French Army, World War I.
Despite longevity and the sort of reputation that passes off full-frontal charm as the very spirit of France, Chevalier did not make many films. Still, too many, as anyone who had to sit through his second American period will attest. That he brought to Paramount in the first adventure of sound a restrained lewdness is beyond question. But it seems equally clear that his act was artificial and limited. “I’ll admit you’re very funny,”
Jeanette MacDonald says to him in The Merry Widow, "but not terrific...not colossal.’’ Smiling innuendo in youth lasted only a few years; it got rather more mileage in old age, perhaps because audiences were tickled by the Humbert Humbert-like double entendre of “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”