MEL FERRER

'Mel Ferrer' (born August 25, 1917 in Elberon, New Jersey) is an American actor, film director and film producer.

Contents

Early life

Career

Personal life

External links

Early life

Born 'Melchior Gaston Ferrer' into a prosperous family, his Cuban-born father a medical surgeon and his mother a prominent New York City socialite. He is the brother of noted cardiologist and educator, Dr. M. Irené Ferrer and noted surgeon, Dr. Jose M. Ferrer. Mel Ferrer was educated at private schools before attending Princeton University until his sophomore year, when he dropped out to devote more time to acting. At that time he also worked as an editor of a small Vermont newspaper and wrote a children's book, "Tito's Hats."

Career

Ferrer began acting in summer stock as a teenager and at age twenty-one was appearing on the Broadway stage as a chorus dancer, making his debut there as an actor two years later. After a bout with polio, he entered the radio world as a DJ in Texas and Arkansas, developing into a producer-director of top-rated shows for NBC in New York. He returned to Broadway and then became involved in motion pictures, directing more than ten feature films and acting in more than eighty.
In 1945 he made a modest directing debut with ''The Girl of the Limberlost'', a low-budget black-and-white film for Columbia. He returned to Broadway to star in ''Strange Fruit'', based on the novel by Lillian Smith. He made his screen acting debut in ''Lost Boundaries'' (1949), and as an actor is best remembered for his role of the injured puppeteer in the musical ''Lili'' (1953) (starring Leslie Caron) and as Prince Andrei in ''War and Peace'' (1956) (co-starring with his then wife, Audrey Hepburn).
Ferrer pursued limited television, doing some directing for the series ''The Farmer's Daughter'' in (1963), but it best remembered for his role opposite Jane Wyman as Angela Channing's attorney and briefly, her husband, Phillip Erikson, in Falcon Crest from 1981–1984. (Erikson met his demise in the same plane crash that killed Cliff Robertson).

Personal life

He has been married five times, most notably to actress Audrey Hepburn from 1954 to 1968, with whom he had a son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, born in 1960. He and Hepburn had acquired a home in Switzerland and after their divorce he maintained a residence in Lausanne and often worked on films in Europe. He has been married five times to four women (remarrying his first wife, Frances Pilchard, after his divorce from Barbara C. Tripp), and has five children in total by three of the marriages. He dated Tessa Kennedy, an interior designer but a married woman, before his marriage to Lisa Soukhotine in 1971.
He had two children with Frances Pilchard, of whom the eldest child died as an infant.
His sister was the famous cardiologist and educator Dr. M. Irené Ferrer, she helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram (which have become diagnostic essentials in heart treatment).
He is unrelated to actors Jose Ferrer and Miguel Ferrer.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Mel Ferrer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6268 Hollywood Blvd.

External links

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