Charles boyer biography in french

John Baxter’s Charles Boyer: The French Lover makes an incisive and long-awaited contribution to bio star scholarship by shedding new light on a major, though puzzlingly unprobed, actor of twentieth-century cinema.

The book comprises forty-seven short chapters, charting Boyer’s rise to international fame, through to his eventual tragic end. Baxter sets the scene of Boyer’s birth at the turn of the twentieth century in South-western France, foregrounding his close relationship with his mother, the first to introduce him to the theatres of Paris, then describing the outbreak of World War One just as Boyer’s schooldays are coming to an end. What resonates strongly from the början is Boyer’s deftness and early commitment to the craft of acting, travelling on the road as part of a troupe, performing in national theatres as a ‘second-rate touring actor’ (18), gaining early notoriety for his ‘freakishly good memory’ (18), all the while supplementing his modest income by gambling and p

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