June Duprez
| June Duprez | |
|---|---|
Louis Hayward and Duprez in And Then There Were None
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| Born |
14 May 1918 Teddington, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 30 October 1984 (aged 66) London, England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1936–1948, 1961 |
| Spouse(s) | Frederick Guy Beauchamp (1935–1942) (divorced) George M. Moffett, Jr. (1948–1965) (divorced) 2 children |
June Ada Rose Duprez (14 May 1918 – 30 October 1984) was an English film actress.
The daughter of American vaudeville performer Fred Duprez and Australian Florence Isabelle Matthews, she was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England, during an air raid in the final months of World War I.
She began acting in her teens with the Coventry repertory company after studying at the Froebel Institute, and was a film extra in 1935 before appearing in The Crimson Circle the following year. Her next film was The Cardinal (1936), and she had a small role in The Spy in Black (1939), but it was her fourth film, the epic London Films adaptation of A. E. W. Mason's The Four Feathers (1939), that made her a film star, acting opposite John Clements, Ralph Richardson, and C. Aubrey Smith. Her peak of success came with the landmark fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which she also made for Alexander Korda's London Films (on locations in the United Kingdom, northern Africa, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona).
Korda took charge of her career after this point and brought her to Hollywood where he set her asking price at $50,000 per film. However, as Duprez had not yet achieved the level of popularity in America that she had in Britain, this tactic only served to place her out of contention for most roles. When she was finally released from Korda's contract she appeared in such low budget fare as They Raid by Night (1942), Little Tokyo, U.S.A. (1942), and Tiger Fangs (1943). Clifford Odets' grim None But the Lonely Heart (1944), in which she co-starred with Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore, commenced a brief return to films of higher production values. Duprez performed well amid a top ensemble cast in René Clair's film version of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1945). That same year she appeared opposite John Loder in The Brighton Strangler. In the film noir Calcutta (1947) she starred with Alan Ladd, Gail Russell, and William Bendix.
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