Magali Noel born 27 June 1931

Magali Noël (27 June 1931 – 23 June 2015) was a French actress and singer.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the French actress and singer Magali Noël was as popular as Brigitte Bardot, Annie Girardot, Jeanne Moreau and Sophia Loren in continental Europe. A striking brunette, she acted in close to 100 films and was first directed by the French cinema luminaries René Clair, Jules Dassin, Julien Duvivier, Sacha Guitry and Jean Renoir in a series of decorative roles – ingénue, chanteuse, soubrette, femme fatale – whose limitations she transcended.

Her subsequent career combined theatre and television as well as more challenging film parts. Famously, she appeared in three of Federico Fellini’s most celebrated and memorable films – La Dolce Vita, Satyricon and Amarcord – and became known as the Italian director’s muse. However, the exact nature of their relationship remained unsubstantiated. “It was a great relationship,” said Stéphanie Vial-Noël, her daughter with the actor Jean-Pierre Bernard. “Platonic or not at the start, I do not know. Federico called any time of day or night. He was like another dad for me.”

Born Magali Françoise Noëlle Camille Guiffray to French parents in the diplomatic corps, she grew up in what is now Izmir, Turkey, where she began singing in her teens. Moving to Paris in 1951, she was the wife of the popular star Bourvil in Hervé Bromberger’s gentle comedy Seul Dans Paris (Alone in Paris), and was soon appearing alongside Bardot in Le Fils de Caroline Chérie (1955), Jean Devaivre’s Napoleonic drama, and Clair’s romantic Les Grandes Manœuvres (Summer Manœuvres, 1955), as well as opposite the monstre sacré Jean Gabin in Henri Decoin’s taut thriller Razzia Sur La Chnouf (Chnouf, also 1955).

                              

Her recording career began in France in 1956, and her most famous song was "Fais-moi mal, Johnny" ("Hurt me Johnny"), a duet sung with Boris Vian who had written the lyrics and with music composed by Alain Goraguer. In this torrid rock in French, the singer declared love "the love that goes boom!" ". Words deemed sulphurous for the time, to such an extent that the song had been banned from the radio in 1956. "It took the playfulness of Magali Noël to sing it”, recalled the pianist Hervé Sellin, who accompanied her for about thirty years.

Her Fellini roles proved equally sulphurous, starting with Fanny, the dancer in La Dolce Vita (1960), continuing with Fortunata in Satyricon (1969) and concluding with La Gradisca, the Hollywood-fixated glamorous hairdresser who is the object of many a male fantasy in fascist Italy in Amarcord, which won a Foreign Language Oscar in 1974. Costa-Gavras cast her in his controversial political thriller Z, winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1970. In total, she has appeared in about sixty films, the last being in 2003, Nothing But Happiness , by Denis Parent. While Z and Amarcord remained her high watermarks, she easily moved into older roles and worked with Chantal Akerman, Tonie Marshall and Jonathan Demme.

 She was also active in television well into the 1990s, appearing  in about thirty TV films (including the saga Les Cœurs brûlés , on TF1 in 1992)  and also in the American cable-TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater, among other projects.. She took her theatrical bow in 2008 with Le Clan, her acclaimed musical homage to Vian, Jacques Prévert and Raymond Queneau.

Noël had a daughter with actor Jean-Pierre Bernard, and two boys, whom she adopted after her remarriage. She died in the retirement home where she was staying at Châteauneuf-Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes, France four days before her 84th birthday on 23 June 2015,

(Edited mainly from an article by Pierre Perrone @ The Independent)