Background
Mel Ferrer was born on 25 August 1917 in Elberon, New Jersey, United States.
Mel Ferrer was born on 25 August 1917 in Elberon, New Jersey, United States.
Ferrer went to Princeton and worked in publishing while he was cultivating himself as a rep actor.
Technically, Ferrer has five pictures to his credit as a director, even if one of them is the multifla-vored Vendetta. But, like José Ferrer, he is an actor who has striven to direct, only to make films that seem not just without purpose, but unattended. It is an odd dilettante involvement in films by a man who has promised more soulful intelligence than he has ever delivered.
His Broadway debut was as a dancer. After working as an actor and director lor radio, he entered films in 1947—as an actor—in Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker); and as the director of The Girl of the Limberlost. When Vendetta was eventually released in 1950, Ferrer was given the credit for the stew of himself, Howard Hughes, Max Ophuls, Preston Sturges, and Stuart Heisler—presumably on the principle of passing it off on the least vigorous.
By then, Ferrer was shooting out in all directions: under contract to Selznick as actor and director; as a founder member of the La Jolla Playhouse; as a Broadway director; and as assistant to John Ford on The Fugitive (47). In 1950, at RKO, he directed Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan in The Secret Fury and then settled for a period of acting: Born to Be Bad (50, Nicholas Ray); The Brave Bulls (51, Robert Rossen); Scaramouche (52, George Sidney); Rancho Notorious (52, Fritz Lang); Lili (53, Charles Walters); Saadia (53, Albert Lewin); Knights of the Round Table (54, Richard Thorpe); Oh. Rosalinda!! (55, Michael Powell); as Andrei in War and Peace (56, King Vidor); to France for Elena et les Homines (56, Jean Renoir); as Robert Colin in The Sun Also Rises (57, Henry King); The Vintage (57, Jeffrey I layden); and Mayerling (57, Anatole Litvak).
In 1954, Ferrer had married Audrey Hepburn and in 1959 he directed her as Rima in Green Mansions, full of plastic studio jungle, Villa-Lobos music, and Katherine Dunham dancers, but implacably dull and managing to make Hepburn look less than exquisite. He and his wife moved to Europe in the 1960s and Ferrer continued his somewhat ineffectual flowering. As an actor, he gathered some eccentric parts: Fraulein (57, Henrv Koster); The World, the Flesh and the Devil (59, Ranald MacDougall); Et Mourir de Plaisir (60, Roger Vadim); The Hands of Orlac (61, Edmond Greville); and The Fall of the Roman Empire (63, Anthony Mann). He went to Spain to produce and play the lead in El Greco (64, Luciano Salce); and in the same year he acted in Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine). In 1967 he produced, wrote, and directed Cabriola, and then produced his wife in Wait Until Dark (67, Terence Young).
Next year they were divorced, and Ferrer later suffered a heart attack. But in 1971, he produced and acted in Time for Loving (Christopher Miles); in 1972 he produced Embassy (Gordon Hessler); in 1974 he produced W (Richard Quine); The Antichrist (74, Alberto de Martino); Brannigan (75, Douglas Hiekox); Death Trap (76, Tobe Hooper); Zwischengleis (78, Wolfgang Staudte); The Amazing Captain Nemo (78, Alex March); and The Norsemen (78, Charles B. Pierce).
Since then, he has had an “international" career, in films few' people have seen: as an extraterrestrial in The Visitor (79, Michael J. Paradise); Top of the Hill (80, Walter Grauman) for TV; The Fifth Floor (80. Howard Avedis); The Memory of Eva Ryker (80, Grauman); a Spanish-Italian coproduction, City of the Walking Dead (80, Umberto Lenzi); Fugitive Family (80, Paul Krasny); Lili Marleen (81, Rainer Werner Fassbinder), as a man who helps Jew's escape the Nazis; One Shoe Makes It Murder (82, William Hale); Seduced (85, Jerrold Freedman); Outrage! (86, Grauman); and Peter the Great (86, Marvin Chomsky and Lawrence Schiller). He had also played in TVs Falcon Crest for a few years in the early eighties.