Mel Ferrer

American actor, director, and producer

• Born: August 25, 1917
• Birthplace: Elberon, New Jersey
• Died: June 2, 2008
• Place of death: Santa Barbara, California

Ferrer had a varied career in the United States and Europe as actor, director, and producer in the theater, films, and television but is best known as the first husband of Audrey Hepburn.

Early Life

Melchior Gaston Ferrer (MEHL-kee-or fur-REHR) was born in Elberon, New Jersey, to Dr. José Maria Ferrer and Irene O’Donohue Ferrer. His Cuban-born father was chief of staff at New York St. Vincent’s Hospital, and his mother was the daughter of a coffee broker who became New York City commissioner of parks.

Ferrer attended private schools in New York and Connecticut before going to Princeton University, dropping out when he won an award for writing a play. He then worked for a newspaper in Vermont and went to Mexico to write. Ferrer collaborated on a children’s book, Tito’s Hats (1940), with artist Jean Charlot.

As a teenager, Ferrer had acted in summer stock theater at the Cape Cod Playhouse, and he appeared on Broadway in 1938 as a dancer in two unsuccessful musicals. He returned to New York from Mexico to act on radio and play small roles on Broadway in Kind Lady (1940) and Cue for Passion (1940). While recovering from polio, he was a disc jockey in Arkansas and Texas until he found television work with NBC in New York. He was hired by Columbia Pictures as a dialogue coach before directing the low-budget The Girl of the Limberlost (1945).

Life’s Work

Ferrer returned to Broadway to appear in Strange Fruit (1945), about an interracial love affair, directed and produced by José Ferrer (no relation). He then directed an acclaimed 1946 revival of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), which made a star of José Ferrer. Determined to establish himself as a film director, Ferrer returned to Hollywood as an assistant on John Ford’s Mexican-set The Fugitive (1947), in which he played a small role. In 1947, with Dorothy McGuire and Gregory Peck, he cofounded the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and remained one of its artistic directors until 1959.

Ferrer was established as a film actor by Lost Boundaries (1949), in which he played a light-skinned African American doctor who must pretend to be white to find work. After this success, Ferrer costarred with Joan Fontaine and Robert Ryan in Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad (1950) and directed the stylish melodrama The Secret Fury (1950), with Ryan and Claudette Colbert. Ferrer tried to salvage producer Howard Hughes’s Vendetta (1950), a troubled production with four earlier directors, including Max Ophüls and Preston Sturges.

Ferrer worked steadily as an actor in Hollywood and Europe throughout the 1950’s. Robert Rossen’s The Brave Bulls (1951) gave Ferrer one of his most notable roles as Mexico’s leading bullfighter. Ferrer followed The Brave Bulls with Fritz Lang’s offbeat Western Rancho Notorious (1952); the swashbuckler Scaramouche (1952); the romantic Lili (1953), one of Ferrer’s most popular films, in which he plays a crippled puppeteer opposite Leslie Caron; and Knights of the Round Table (1953), in which he portrays King Arthur opposite Ava Gardner’s Guinevere and Robert Taylor’s Lancelot.

Before moving to Hollywood, Ferrer had been divorced three times, marrying his first wife twice, and was father of four children. He gained his greatest fame through his relationship with the young actor Audrey Hepburn. The two met in 1953 and starred on Broadway the next year in Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine. They were married a few weeks after the play closed. Ferrer and Hepburn costarred in King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956), and he directed her in Green Mansions (1959). Neither film was a critical or commercial success, but Wait Until Dark (1967), which Ferrer produced, was a hit for Hepburn.

Ferrer starred with Ingrid Bergman in Jean Renoir’s Paris Does Strange Things (1956), played Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises (1957), and costarred with Harry Belafonte in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), which explores racial prejudice. While Hepburn remained one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Ferrer’s acting and directing careers declined after the 1950’s. The disparity in their fame created tensions in the marriage, but the couple remained married until 1968. Their son, Sean, was born in 1960.

Ferrer continued to work regularly as an actor in films and television through 1998. His best-known films were The Longest Day (1962), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981), but he toiled mostly in obscure low-budget films, especially in Italy. He was best known to the American public for his role in the television soap operaFalcon Crest from 1981 to 1984. Ferrer’s final marriage, to Elizabeth Soukhotine in 1971, lasted until his death in 2008.

Significance

Although he was never a major star, Ferrer worked steadily in theater, film, and television for almost six decades. He was essentially a reliable character actor who could adapt his skills to any period or nationality and flourished particularly when Hollywood was still obsessed with costume dramas. Ironically, although Ferrer regularly played French, German, and Italian characters, The Brave Bulls was the only film in which he played a Latino. That film, Lost Boundaries, and Lili constitute his best work as an actor. His most lasting fame results from his association with Hepburn, one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars.

Bibliography

Berkvist, Robert. “Mel Ferrer, Reluctant Star, Dies at Ninety.” The New York Times, June 4, 2008, p. A23. Concise summary of Ferrer’s life and career.

Ferrer, Mel. “Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer: Their Homes in Malibu and Beverly Hills.” Architectural Digest 63 (March, 2006): 160-165. Ferrer recalls the two homes he shared with Hepburn.

Spoto, Donald. Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn. New York: Harmony Books, 2006. Ferrer is presented as domineering husband in this biography of Hepburn.