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Rossana Podestà dead at 79: ‘Helen of Troy’ actress later featured in sword-and-sandal spectacles, risqué sex comedies (photo: Jacques Sernas and Rossana Podestà in ‘Helen of Troy’) Rossana Podestà, the sensual star of the 1955 epic Helen of Troy and other sword-and-sandal European productions of the ’50s and ’60s — in addition to a handful of risqué sex comedies of the ’70s — died earlier today, December 10, 2013, in Rome according to several Italian news outlets. Podestà was 79. She was born Carla Dora Podestà on August 20, 1934, in, depending on the source, either Zlitan or Tripoli, in Libya, at the time an Italian colony. According to the IMDb, the renamed Rossana Podestà began her film career in 1950, when she was featured in a small role in Dezsö Ákos Hamza’s Strano appuntamento ("Strange Appointment"). However, according to online reports, she was actually discovered by director Léonide Moguy, who cast her in a small role in...

Jean Kent: ‘The Browning Version’ 1951, Gainsborough folds (photo: Jean Kent in ‘The Browning Version,’ with Michael Redgrave) (See previous post: “Jean Kent: Gainsborough Pictures Film Star Dead at 92.”) Seemingly stuck in Britain, Jean Kent’s other important leads of the period came out in 1948: John Paddy Carstairs’ Alfred Hitchcock-esque thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with spies on board the Orient Express, and Gordon Parry’s ensemble piece Bond Street. Following two minor 1950 comedies, Her Favorite Husband / The Taming of Dorothy and The Reluctant Widow / The Inheritance, Kent’s movie stardom was virtually over, though she would still have one major film role in store. In what is probably her best remembered and most prestigious effort, Jean Kent played Millie Crocker-Harris, the unsympathetic, adulterous wife of unfulfilled teacher Michael Redgrave, in Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version — a Javelin Films production...

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

Popular stalwart of film classics such as The Browning Version and Fanny By Gaslight

Jean Kent, the fiery, sexy, red-haired bad girl of British movies in the 1940s, who has died aged 92, was a fine actor, and clearly enjoyed life, her work and – while it lasted – her cinema fame. While never a top star, she gained a considerable following, and from the 1960s appeared regularly on television. Her film breakthrough came as a result of stage work: after the revue Apple Sauce, starring Vera Lynn and Max Miller, reached the London Palladium in 1941, she was offered a long-term contract, and the first of her Gainsborough Pictures appearances came in It's That Man Again (1943), with another wartime entertainer, the radio comic Tommy Handley.

It took another four films for her to make her first real mark as Lucy, the friend of Phyllis Calvert in the title role of the melodrama Fanny By Gaslight,...

British film and television actress Jean Kent has died after suffering a fall, per UK reports. She was 92. Kent made her name in the 1940s and 1950s starring in a number of melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures, including Fanny By Gaslight, Bees In Paradise, Madonna of the Seven Moons, and The Wicked Lady. On another Gainsborough film, 1946′s Caravan, she met actor and future husband Josef Ramart. They starred together again in the 1949 musical comedy Trottie True. Kent moved into television in the 1950s, appearing in shows including Epilogue to Capricorn, Sir Francis Drake, and Thicker Than Water. Notable film roles came opposite Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl and in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse.