Pierre Fresnay Movies and Career Information

Pierre Fresnay (4 April 1897 - 9 January 1975) was a French stage and film actor. Born Pierre Jules Louis Laudenbach in Paris, France he was encouraged by his uncle, the actor Claude Garry, to pursue a career in theater and film. Fresnay became one of the most important French stage and film actors of his era. Throughout the 1920s, Fresnay appeared in many popular stage productions, most notably in the title role of Marcel Pagnol’s Marius (1929), which ran for over 500 performances. His first great screen role was as Marius in the 1931 film adaptation of the play of the same name. He played the role again in the next two parts of Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles Trilogy, Fanny (1932) and César (1936). He appeared in more than sixty films, eight of which were with Yvonne Printemps, with whom he lived since 1934. In that same year, he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. One of his most notable films was the 1937 epic Grand Illusion directed by Jean Renoir. A soldier in the French Army during World War I, he returned to his career a hero. However, under the German occupation of World War II, Fresnay worked for the Franco-German film company