Fifi D'Orsay
Also Known As: Fifi Dorsay, The French Bombshell, Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier
Biography: Fifi D'Orsay was born Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier in Montreal, Canada, to a father who was a postal clerk. The couple had a large family, with Fifi having 11 siblings. She was educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Montreal before graduating and finding work as a secretary. As a young typist she wished to become an actress, and moved to New York City. Once there she found work with the Greenwich Village Follies, after an audition in which she sang "Yes! We Have No Bananas" in French. When asked where she was from, she told the director she was from Paris, France, and that she had worked in the Folies Bergère. The impressed director hired her, billing her as "Mademoiselle Fifi". While working in the Follies, she became involved with Ed Gallagher, a veteran actor who was half of the successful Broadway comedy team of Gallagher and Shean. Gallagher and D'Orsay put together a vaudeville act, and he coached her in the art of show business. After touring in vaudeville, she headed to Hollywood and adopted the surname "D'Orsay" (after a favorite perfume). Soon after she began working in films, often cast as the "naughty French girl" from "gay Paris". She became a U.S. citizen in 1936, just as her career as a film star came to a sharp halt when she walked out on her contract at Fox Studios and was blacklisted. While never becoming a major top-billing name, she found steady work - appearing with such stalwarts as Bing Crosby and Buster Crabbe. For years she worked in both film and vaudeville; pacing her appearances in film with continued performances in vaudeville. When age put an end to the glamour roles, she took jobs in television; including 2 appearances each on ABC's Adventures in Paradise (as a mother superior in the episode "Castaways"), and the CBS legal drama Perry Mason (in the episode "The Case of the Grumbling Grandfather" and in the episode “The Case of the Bountiful Beauty”)- as well appearing in the CBS sitcom Pete and Gladys. She was a contestant on Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life, and at the age of sixty-seven she bookended her career with a return to the Broadway stage in the Tony Award-winning musical, Follies.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Adult: No
Birthday: April 16, 1904
Age: 121 years old
Gender: Female
Deathday: December 02, 1983
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Known For:
Nabonga
Overview: When a treasure hunter seeks a downed airplane in the jungles of Africa, he encounters one of the passenger's young daughter, now fully grown, and with a gorilla protector.
Genres: Adventure Mystery Crime
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1944-01-25
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The Gangster
Overview: Based on the novel Low Company. One of the most peculiar film noirs of the 1940s stars Barry Sullivan as a small-time hood who suffers a mental breakdown as his big plans begin to crumble. Beautiful Belita is the slumming society girlfriend who only fuels his paranoia.
Genres: Crime Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1947-11-25
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Going Hollywood
Overview: The film tells the story of Sylvia, a French teacher at an all-girl school, who wants to find love. When she hears Bill Williams on the radio, she decides to go visit and thank him. However, difficult problems lay ahead when Lili gets in the way.
Genres: Music Romance Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1933-12-22
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On the Level
Overview: An ironworker and his equally tough friend decide to leave New Orleans to work as beam-walkers on a New York City skyscraper. This arouses the ire of his Cajun girlfriend who promptly shoots at him as he walks away and then follows him to the Big Apple where she becomes a nightclub performer.
Genres: Action Comedy Crime
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1930-05-18
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Delinquent Daughters
Overview: A town is shocked when a high school girl commits suicide. A reporter and a cop team up to investigate and find out exactly what is going on among the youth of the town.
Genres: Crime Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1944-07-15
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Mr. Lemon Of Orange
Overview: A fast and uproarious farce of gunmen, gun molls, and the Swedish boy's night out.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-03-22
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Wonder Bar
Overview: Harry and Inez are a dance team at the Wonder Bar. Inez loves Harry, but he is in love with Liane, the wife of a wealthy business man. Al Wonder and the conductor/singer Tommy are in love with Inez. When Inez finds out that Harry wants to leave Paris and is going to the USA with Liane, she kills him.
Genres: Crime Drama Music Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1934-03-31
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They Had to See Paris
Overview: Oklahoma mechanic Pike Peters finds himself part owner of an oil field. His wife Idy, hitherto content, decides the family must go to Paris to get "culture" and meet "the right kind of people." Pike and his grown son and daughter soon have flirtatious French admirers; Idy rents a chateau from an impoverished aristocrat; while Pike responds to each new development with homespun wit. In the inevitable clash, will pretentiousness and sophistication or common sense triumph?
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1929-09-18
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Women Everywhere
Overview: Charles Jackson, an American sea-captain and singing soldier-of-fortune, is arrested by the French Foreign Legion for running guns to the rebel forces in Morocco fighting against the rule of the French in north Africa. He is saved by Lili La Fleur, a singer/dance in a Morocco café and, through her, eventually becomes a hero to the Foreign Legion.
Genres: Adventure Romance Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1930-06-01
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The Life of Jimmy Dolan
Overview: Champion boxer Jimmy Dolan has cultivated a wholesome image for himself, but he's a boozer and womanizer behind the scenes. Intoxicated at a party, he punches a reporter who threatens to expose his hypocrisy, and accidentally kills him. Dolan panics and skips town, winding up on a farm that serves as a home for disabled children run by kindhearted Peggy. As the cynical Dolan falls for Peggy, he begins to change his ways.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1933-06-03
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The Girl from Calgary
Overview: A French-Canadian girl is a champion bronc rider and is also a nightclub singer. An ambitious young man sees her act one night and is struck by her talent, realizing that she is good enough to become a Broadway star. He convinces her to accompany him to New York, where she indeed does become a Broadway star. However, the young man finds himself being squeezed out by greedy Broadway producers who see the talented young girl as their own personal gold mine.
Genres: Comedy Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1932-10-23
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Hot for Paris
Overview: Rough sea dog John Patrick Duke has a weakness for women and strong drink. Little does he know that he won a million dollars on Longchamp with the horses. Earlier, he caused a riot in a French hotel. He therefore thinks he is being pursued when officials try to inform him of that cash prize. In the end, John and his friend Axel are forced to take the money. This allows them to have a party with their French friends. The film is believed to be lost.
Genres: Music Comedy Adventure
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1929-12-22
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What a Way to Go!
Overview: A four-time widow discusses her four marriages, in which all of her husbands became incredibly rich and died prematurely because of their drive to be rich.
Genres: Comedy Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-07-31
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Those Three French Girls
Overview: An addled Englishman's efforts to save three young women from eviction land them all in jail and leads to other adventures and mischief.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1930-10-10
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Dixie Jamboree
Overview: A medicine man on the last show boat on the Mississippi is mistaken by two gangsters as a bootleger, and has to envade them.
Genres: Music Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1944-08-15
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Three Legionnaires
Overview: Set in the post-WWI days in the Siberian tank town of Skzavoskanoff, U. S. Army Sergeant Chuck Connors and Private Jiimy Barton are charged with upholding the principles of American Democracy in the face of the exotic charms of Olga, and a dastardly plot by the phony General Stavinski and his treacherous aide. Finally the impostors are exposed.
Genres: Comedy Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1937-07-10
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Wild and Wonderful
Overview: Cognac, a pampered poodle and popular star on French television, creates marital problems for his pretty owner Giselle when he becomes jealous of her new husband.
Genres: Comedy Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1964-06-09
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The Stolen Jools
Overview: Famous actress Norma Shearer's jewels are stolen… (Star-packed promotional short film intended to raise funds for the National Variety Artists Tuberculosis Sanatorium.)
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-04-04
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Women of All Nations
Overview: Marines Flagg and Quirt fought together in WWI and Panama. After some time in New York they go to Sweden and compete for the love of Else. Next they go to Nicaragua and help earthquake victims. Then to Egypt where Else is now in Prince Hassan's harem.
Genres: Comedy Drama War
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-05-31
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Piano Mooner
Overview: Harry is a workaholic piano tuner whose bride-to-be's brother threatens to kill him if he doesn't marry his sister. His latest job assignment involves a socialite and a pesky French maid hounding him constantly.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1942-12-11
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Young as You Feel
Overview: Lemuel Morehouse, the owner of a profitable meatpacking company in Chicago, bemoans the fact that neither of his two sons have the time nor inclination to eat with him. Billy is obsessed with culture, while Tom is a physical fitness nut. At the office, Lemuel is exasperated when Billy arrives for work at four in the afternoon and cannot stay because of a party he is giving that night to unveil a statue he bought for $20,000. Lemuel then finds Tom meeting with his golf committee rather than working. When the boys argue that business is only a means to an end, and that happiness and enjoyment of life are desired goals, Lemuel counters their contentions by declaring that what they really need are wives and tells them that Dorothy and Rose Gregson, the daughters of an old friend, will soon be visiting.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1931-08-06
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That's Entertainment, Part II
Overview: Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire present more golden moments from the MGM film library, this time including comedy and drama as well as classic musical numbers.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-05-16
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Submarine Base
Overview: Ship engineer Jim Taggert is rescued from a torpedoed tramp steamer by Joe Morgan, an American gangster that found New York too hot for him, and has become a fisherman operating from an out-of-the-way island off of the coast of South America. Morgan makes his headquarters at the Halfway House run by the parents of Maria Styx as a bar and dance resort catering to the planters and traders of the island. Taggert finds himself practically a prisoner along with a group of American girls acting as entertainers at the resort. Taggert shadows Morgan in his activities in a remote cove and finds that Morgan is supplying German U-boat commanders with torpedoes, but does not know that Morgan has rigged the torpedoes with clock devices that explode when at sea and sinks the U-boats.
Genres: Action Drama War
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1943-07-20
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The Art of Love
Overview: Struggling artist fakes his own death so his works will increase in value.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1965-06-30
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Assignment to Kill
Overview: A private eye is hired by an insurance company to investigate a shipping magnate suspected of deliberately sinking his own ships for the insurance money. He finds himself involved in a web of deception, double-crossing and murder.
Genres: Crime Drama Mystery
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1968-05-01
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