Yves Vincent(1921-2016)

Tall and handsome,both athletic and aristocratic-looking, brown-haired (later in life silver-haired), Yves Vincent had everything to charm dames. And charm them he did, in real life, on the stage, on the big and little screen, for nearly fifty years. Born in France in 1921, he was raised and spent his youth in Algeria. Both a sporty type and literature enthusiast, this multi-talented man excelled at water-polo (he was a champion water-polo player in the R.U.A. team), was a good tennis player and a passable horse rider but his love for books finally led him to Radio-Alger where he started his acting career as a member of the channel's acting company. He was also an occasional announcer there. During World War II he was called up to work on the "Camp des Chênes" Youth Camp. And in 1944 he made his first movie in Cairo with his mother as partner. After the war, he debuted in France as a leading man, his good looks and his fine presence boosting his career from the start. He could be a professional knife-thrower (in Pierre Chenal's curious "La Foire aux Chimères", with Erich Von Stroheim),a doctor (in "La Maternelle") or a drug trafficker (in "Méfiez-vous des Blondes", Hunebelle's amusing noir spoof) with equal ease. The trouble is that too many of the movies he was in are now old-fashioned (the worst being "Capitaine Ardant", in which he plays a valiant French officer fighting back against "nasty native rebels") and have been forgotten. So that, after a quick start, Yves Vincent got fewer and fewer roles.In the late sixties and early seventies, for instance, he was reduced to play second fiddle to Louis de Funès in three of his films or to appear in two cheesy soft porn flicks concocted by the king of the genre, Max Pécas. He was luckier at the theater where he appeared - among other plays - alongside Arletty in the French adaptation of Tennessee Williams' "A streetcar named Desire"(Un tramway nommé Désir) and with Edwige Feuillère in "La Dame aux Camélias". He has also done a lot of work on television where he often embodied figures of authority. Yves Vincent retired in 1991.