Charles Boyer

With his dark good looks and resonant, deeply accented murmur, Charles Boyer personified European romance in his native France and Hollywood for over four decades in such films as "Algiers" (1938), "All This, And Heaven Too" (1941) and "Gaslight" (1944). Though a studious, retiring figure off-screen, Boyer left female moviegoers swooning in the 1930s and 1940s, earning him four Oscar nominations as dashing, boundlessly erotic men whose lives, spent either in pursuit of crime, fortune or royalty, made them unavailable to the women who fell hopelessly in love with him. He stepped gracefully into character roles in the 1950s, scoring a triumph on Broadway with "Don Juan in Hell" (1951) and moving into production as a co-owner of the successful television company Four Star Pictures. He remained active as a symbol of old Hollywood courtliness throughout the 1960s, earning a final Oscar nod for "Fanny" (1961) before retiring to care for his wife in the late 1970s. Her death in 1978 spurred the grief-stricken actor to take his own life that same year, forever enmeshing his life with his screen image as the tragic lover whose tremendous heart was his greatest burden.