Post by Sirenna on Aug 23, 2007 12:24:53 GMT -5
Lovely Leslie Caron deserving of Emmy Award
Aug 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Martin Knelman
The Emmy awards for last year's TV season will be handed out three weeks from Sunday, and I am rooting for Leslie Caron – a great Hollywood star of the 1950s – to emerge at age 76 as a winner decades after she seemed to disappear from view.
If she does, it will be because Ted Kotcheff, the Toronto-born executive producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, had a terrific idea of how to put Caron back into the showbiz spotlight.
In an episode shot a year ago and aired in October, Caron gave a memorably touching performance as a woman from France persuaded by detectives to break a long silence and testify against a man who sexually assaulted her 40 years earlier.
Kotcheff (who directed the wonderful 1974 movie version of Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) knew that Caron, a one-time ingénue who played the title roles in Gigi and Lili, would be perfect for the part.
He recalled how the adorable waif-like dancer with high cheekbones was discovered by Gene Kelly when she was a 17-year-old dancer with the Ballets des Champs-Elysées in Paris. She was swept off her feet by Kelly in MGM's Gershwin musical An American in Paris, which won the Oscar for best movie of 1951.
Caron, who had not had any offers for a long time, was caught by surprise. She was in Sardinia, planning to build a cottage, when the script came by email. Somehow the producers managed to get her a visa in record time and the next thing she knew, she was in New Jersey shooting the episode.
The New Yorker magazine's Talk of the Town section dispatched a reporter, which resulted in a delightful item entitled "Gigi in Jersey."
If she wins an Emmy for Best Guest Performance in a series, Caron will surely qualify as comeback kid of the year (senior division).
Aug 23, 2007 04:30 AM
Martin Knelman
The Emmy awards for last year's TV season will be handed out three weeks from Sunday, and I am rooting for Leslie Caron – a great Hollywood star of the 1950s – to emerge at age 76 as a winner decades after she seemed to disappear from view.
If she does, it will be because Ted Kotcheff, the Toronto-born executive producer of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, had a terrific idea of how to put Caron back into the showbiz spotlight.
In an episode shot a year ago and aired in October, Caron gave a memorably touching performance as a woman from France persuaded by detectives to break a long silence and testify against a man who sexually assaulted her 40 years earlier.
Kotcheff (who directed the wonderful 1974 movie version of Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) knew that Caron, a one-time ingénue who played the title roles in Gigi and Lili, would be perfect for the part.
He recalled how the adorable waif-like dancer with high cheekbones was discovered by Gene Kelly when she was a 17-year-old dancer with the Ballets des Champs-Elysées in Paris. She was swept off her feet by Kelly in MGM's Gershwin musical An American in Paris, which won the Oscar for best movie of 1951.
Caron, who had not had any offers for a long time, was caught by surprise. She was in Sardinia, planning to build a cottage, when the script came by email. Somehow the producers managed to get her a visa in record time and the next thing she knew, she was in New Jersey shooting the episode.
The New Yorker magazine's Talk of the Town section dispatched a reporter, which resulted in a delightful item entitled "Gigi in Jersey."
If she wins an Emmy for Best Guest Performance in a series, Caron will surely qualify as comeback kid of the year (senior division).
