Actrice française, née dans la famille des princes Romanov, le 5-XII-1908, décédé en 1981.

New York, 1942 … sa présence réconfort Antoine dans son désir d'etre dorloté comme un enfant et la tentative désespérée de se comporter comme un homme. Stacy de La Bruyère.

Jean Cocteau, 1889-1963, was a french poet, novelist, dramatist, designer and filmmaker. He struggled with opium addiction for most of his adult life and was openly gay, though, in the 1930s, he had at least one significant affair with a woman, Princess Natalie Paley, the beautiful daughter of a Romanov grand duke and herself a major fashion-plate, sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress and Paley's lifelong regret, the fetus was aborted due to the intervention of Marie-Laure de Noailles, who had loved Cocteau as a young woman and was determined to ruin his new romance. Cocteau's most lasting relationship was with the handsome French actor Jean Marais, whom he discovered and cast in "Beauty and the Beast".

Sylvia Scarlett, Directed by George Cukor, Comedy. Topsy Rating, USA,1935.English. Starring Katharine Hepburn. Cary Grant. Brian Aherne. Edmund Gwenn. Natalie Paley. Dennie Moore. Lennox Pawle.
Film Review: A very unusual and charming dramatic comedy, a kind of road movie with a difference. Sylvia Scarlett (Hepburn) and con-artist father (Gwenn) go on the run from trouble, Hepburn dressed as a boy to belie any descriptions that may be put out about the runaway pair. They fall in with Cary Grant and hide out with a travelling troupe of players. Daddy falls in love with a very snaky lady ….The film is a cult movie and unusual in more ways than one. First, it was a career breakthrough for Cary Grant. He had been playing the debonair but rather pallidly-depicted leading man against the heavier Hollywood drama queens. Here was his chance at comedy! Better, it was a part - as a cheerful Cockney entertainer in a travelling troupe - for which he was uniquely qualified in Hollywood. It was exactly the life he had led with the Bob Pender comedy troupe he joined in England when he was only 14 years old. He said later in life that he had turned himself into a totally different personality, "a combination of Jack Buchanan, Noel Coward and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and, finally, I became that person. Or he became me." *Sylvia Scarlett* may be the only performance in his whole career when he shows you a little bit of the boisterous Archie Leach - the person Cary Grant really was. He tried it again, less successfully, in *None but the Lonely Heart*, but the smooth Grant personality had already taken over 100%. Second, it was a film unique in the long career of George Cukor. One of Hollywood's most able and consistently successful directors - in every type of movie - he was labelled the "woman's director" par excellence. He worked with Hepburn nine times in all and, when Selznick fired him from *Gone with the Wind* on Clark Gable's insistence - Cukor was avowedly, if discreetly, homosexual - the leading actresses, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland continued to consult him secretly throughout the long filming. Here, with the naturally boyish Hepburn dressed as a male for almost the whole of the film, he had an opportunity to be far more sexually provocative than usual: " [Sylvia Scarlett], perhaps the most notable early example of the androgyny that runs through Hepburn's career, was a groundbreaking film for its undermining of socially constructed norms of femininity and masculinity."