This past March was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Germaine Lefebvre (1931-1990), better known as Capucine (French for nasturtium). Cinéastes will remember the particular feline charm she brought to Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960) and Blake Edward’s The Pink Panther (1963).
She was the inamorata of Darryl F. Zanuck, Peter Sellers, and William Holden, and the dear friend and Lausanne neighbor of Audrey Hepburn, whom she met while modeling during the early 1950s. The sight of the two impossible beauties strolling arm in arm down the spring boulevard must have seemed to passersby a mirage or beatific vision. Tormented by chronic depression, Capucine threw herself from her eight-floor penthouse in Lausanne.
If her film career was minor, she herself was the embodiment of Europe in its last stage of cosmopolitan glamour and elegance – the Europe of Maxim’s, and Givenchy, and Ophüls, of all that was swept away in 1968. Here’s a tribute to a lost age.