Actress/dancer Leslie Caron

The term "living legend" aptly applies to Leslie Caron.

The French dancer started out in ballet but became a Hollywood sensation when Gene Kelly discovered her in the Ballet des Champs Elysées company in Paris and cast her as the sophisticated Lise Bouvier in the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris.  She ended up getting an MGM contract as a result and moved to America to begin a long film career.

She starred in the 1951 historical thriller The Man with a Cloak, playing a Frenchwoman in 1848 new York during the revolution that brought Louis Napoleon to power in France, with Joseph Cotten and Barbara Stanwyck.  Still, her chief métier was the musical, and she starred in several of them in the 1950s - 1953's Lili with Mel Ferrer, the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs, the Cinderella retlling The Glass Slipper, also from 1955, and of course, Gigi, with Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier, from 1958.

She worked primarily in Europe after her fifties heyday, but she did appear in Father Goose with Cary Grant (mentioned earlier on this blog) in 1964, and she would even make appearances on American television, playing Nicole Sauguet in the nighttime drama "Falcon Crest."  Leslie Caron's roles at the turn of the millennium included a village window in the comedy-drama Chocolat and as part of the ensemble cast of an effort to reunite a World War II-era swing band in TV movie The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.

Ms. Caron's off-screen activities include a brief relationship with Warren Beatty (big surprise) and owning and operating a hotel-restaurant in France for sixteen years beginning in 1993.  Although a citizen of the world in the truest sense of the term, she obtained American citizenship in 2008 just in time to cast a ballot for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. 

Leslie Caron is still active as an actress, having played a countess in "The Durrells," the U.K. historical series about a British family living in Greece in the 1930s, in 2016.  Despite her success as an actress beyond her dancing abilities, she does have a beef with Hollywood. "Unfortunately, she once said, "Hollywood considers musical dancers as hoofers. Regrettable expression."