Jean Toulout, Mon ciné (1922)
Vintage French journal. Jean Toulout in La Conquête des Gaules (The Conquest of Gaul, Marcel Yonnet, Yan Bernard Dyl, Léonce-Henri Burel, 1922), on the cover of the French journal, Mon Ciné, 44, 21 December 1922. The film deals with a film director, Jean Fortier, who with scarce means tries to film Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul. The film was shot at the Gaumont studios.
Jean Toulout (1887-1962) was a French stage and screen actor, director and scriptwriter. He was married to the actress Yvette Andreyor between 1917 and 1926.
Jean Toulout was born in Paris on 28 September 1887. While no real online biography has been written about him, this bio is largely based on Toulout’s filmography. According to Wikipedia, Toulout started to act on stage at least from 1907, when he played in the Victor Hugo play Marion Delorme at the Comédie Française. One year after, he was already acting at the Théàtre des Arts, so if he ever was a member of the Comédie Française, then not for long. In 1911 he travelled around with Firmin Gémier’s wandering stage company, while at least from 1913 he settled in Paris playing with André Antoine’s 1913 staging of Paul Lindau’s The Prosecutor Hallers. At the same time Toulout debuted in French film, which quickly would become much more intense than his stage career. All-in all he would act in some 100 films within four decades.
Toulout started in short films by Abel Gance for Gance’s own company Le film français (Il y a des pieds au plafond, Le Nègre blanc, La Digue, Le Masque d’horreur, all 1912), but soon after he had also various parts at Gaumont, Pathé and smaller companies, under direction of Louis Feuillade (La Maison des lions, 1912), Henri Andréani (L’Homme qui assassina, 1913; Jacques l’honneur, 1913; Les Enfants d'Édouard, 1914), in addition to films directed by and Gaston Leprieur, René Leprince, Gérard Bourgeois and Alexandre Devarennes. For instance in L’homme qui assassina he is the evil, adulterous Lord Falkland [!], who presses his equally adulterous but goodhearted wife (Mlle Michelle) to either say goodbye to her child or publicly confess her sin, but her lover (Firmin Gémier) kills the husband and is even acquitted by the local Turkish commissionary (Adolphe Candé), who is very understanding in these matters. NB Les Enfants d'Édouard was of course based on Shakespeare.
While Toulout didn’t act on screen in 1915 (he may have been involved in the military during the First World War), he was back on track from later 1916 in several Gaumont films by Feuillade and others. In 1917 he played in Feuillade’s L’Autre, where he met the actress Yvette Andreyor, famous for her parts in Feuillade’s Fantomas and Judex, and they married in 12 June 1917. Toulout and Andreyor would perform together in various films until their divorce in 1926. In 1918 Toulout was the evil antagonist of Emmy Lynn in Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie, blackmailing her for having accidentally killed his sister, thus risking to wreck her new marriage with a composer (Séverin-Mars) but also the life of the composer’s daughter (Elizabeth Nizan). Luckily for the other he doesn’t kill them, only himself. As English Wikipedia writes, “Gance's mastery of lighting, composition and editing was accompanied by a range of literary and artistic references which some critics found pretentious and alienating.” While Toulout would be reunited with Emmy Lynn in La faute d’Odette Marchal (Henri Roussel 1920), he would also be reunited as – again – a jealous, evil husband with Séverin-Mars in Jacques Landauze (1920) by André Hugon, a director with whom Toulout would do several films in the 1920s and 1930s: in the 1920s Le Roi de Camargue (1921), Notre Dame d'amour (1922), Le Diamant noir (1922), La Rue du pavé d'amour (1923), and the first French sound film, Les Trois masques (1929), shot at the London Elstree studios in 15 days.
In the early 1920s Toulout also acted in films by Pierre Bressol (Le Mystère de la villa Mortain, La Mission du docteur Klivers), Germaine Dulac (La fète espagnole, La belle dame sans-merci), Jacques Robert, Henri Fescourt, Armand du Plessis, and others. In La belle dame sans-merci he is a local count who understands a playful femme fatale he brought home is wrecking his whole family, so he has them reunited. In Chantelouve (Georges Monca 1921) he was once more the jealous husband who threatens to kill his wife (Yvette Andreyor). In La conquête des Gaules (Yan B. Dyl, Marcel Yonnet, 1923) he is a film director who tries to film the conquest of the Gauls with modest means. In Le Crime de Monique (Robert Péguy 1923) Yvette Andreyor is accused of killing her brutal violent husband (Toulout, of course). Toulout also acted in Abel Gance’s hilarious comedy Au secours! (1924), starring Max Linder as a man who takes a bet to stay a night in a haunted house.
Instead Toulout masterfully performed the persistent commissionary Javert in Les Misérables (Henri Fescourt 1925), opposite Gabriel Gabrio as Jean Valjean. When a restored version was shown at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone in October 2015, Peter Walsh on his blog Burnt Retina wrote: “Gabriel Gabrio as Jean Valjean was a towering presence on screen, and his redemptive arc, and gradual aging were shown in a convincing way. Jean Toulout as Javert was also superb, at times overpowered by some of the mightiest brows and mutton chops I’ve seen in a long time. The climax of his personal crisis, and collapse of his moral world was incredibly striking, with extreme close-ups capturing a bristling performance.” After smaller parts as in Germaine Dulac’s Antoinette Sabrier (1927), in which Toulout would be paired with Gabrio again, Toulout left the set in 1928 and instead returned to the stage for Le Carnaval de l'amour at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin.
In 1929, however, Toulout returned as Mr de Villefort in the late silent film Monte Christo (Henri Fescourt) – the last big silent French production - as well as in the first French sound film Les Trois masques (see above) as a Corsican whose son (François Rozet) makes a girl (Renée Heribel) pregnant, after which her brothers take revenge during the carnival. Toulout had the lead in the Henry Bataille adaptation La Tendresse (André Hugon 1930) as a famous, older academician who discovers his much younger wife (Marcelle Chantal) isn’t that much in love with him as he is with her. When he gravely falls ill he discovers she still gave the best of her life to him. In 1930 Toulout also tried his luck in film direction and with Joe Francis he directed Le Tampon du Capiston, a comical operetta film on an old spinster (Hélène Hallier), a captain’s sister, who wants to marry the captain’s aide (Rellys) who presumably has inherited a fortune. In the same year Toulout also wrote the scripts for two other films, both by Hugon: La Femme et le Rossignol and Lévy & Cie. The collaboration continued in 1931 when Toulout scripted and starred in Hugon’s Le Marchand de sable, while he had a supporting part in Hugon’s La Croix du Sud. The collaboration with Hugon would last till well into the mid-1940s with Le Faiseur (1936), Monsieur Bégonia (1937), La Rue sans joie (1938), Le Héros de la Marne (1938), La Sévillane (1943), and Le Chant de l'exilé (1943). In 1931 Toulout also scripted Moritz macht sein Glück, a German film by Dutch director Jaap Speijer.
All through the 1930s Toulout had a steady, intense career as actor, but in 1934 he also directed his second film, La Reine du Biarritz, in which he himself had only a small part. Elenita de Sierra Mirador (Alice Field) is the toast of Biarritz. For her, a young groom leaves his wife. For her, a forty-year-old inflamed suddenly and deceives his young wife. But Elenita watched by her mother resigns herself to becoming honest and returns to her husband. Otherwise Toulout had mostly supporting parts, as in Le petit roi (1933) by Julien Duvivier, Fédora (1934) by Louis Gasnier, Les Nuits moscovites (Alexis Granowsky, 1934), and Le Bonheur (Marcel L’Herbier 1934). He could act the jealous, shooting husband again in Paul Schiller’s Le Vertige (1935), again starring Alice Field. He was the judge who forces Henri Garat and Lilian Harvey to marry on the spot in Les Gais lurons (Jacques Natanson/Paul Martin), the French version of Martin’s Glückskinder. He is the prosecutor in La Danseuse rouge (Jean-Paul Paulin 1937) , a courtcase drama starring Vera Korène and inspired by Mata Hari’s trial. Toulout continued to act minor film parts in the late 1930s, during the war years and the late 1940s and quite continuously: fathers, judges, doctors, officers, aristocrats. But a major part among the first three actors of the film he didn’t have anymore. Memorable were his parts in Édouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker 1951), starring Daniel Gélin and Anne Vernon, and – again, a judge - in Obsession (Jean Delannoy 1952) with Michèle Morgan and Raf Vallone. Toulout also worked as voice actor in France, playing Donald Crisp’s part in How Green Was My Valley (1941, released in France in 1946), and Nigel Bruce’s part in Limelight (1952). In the late 1950s Toulout also acted on television.
Jean Toulout died in Paris on 23 October 1962.
Sources: English, French and Italian Wikipedia, IMDB, DVD-Toile, burntretina.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/day-five-at-the-pord....
Jean Toulout, Mon ciné (1922)
Vintage French journal. Jean Toulout in La Conquête des Gaules (The Conquest of Gaul, Marcel Yonnet, Yan Bernard Dyl, Léonce-Henri Burel, 1922), on the cover of the French journal, Mon Ciné, 44, 21 December 1922. The film deals with a film director, Jean Fortier, who with scarce means tries to film Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul. The film was shot at the Gaumont studios.
Jean Toulout (1887-1962) was a French stage and screen actor, director and scriptwriter. He was married to the actress Yvette Andreyor between 1917 and 1926.
Jean Toulout was born in Paris on 28 September 1887. While no real online biography has been written about him, this bio is largely based on Toulout’s filmography. According to Wikipedia, Toulout started to act on stage at least from 1907, when he played in the Victor Hugo play Marion Delorme at the Comédie Française. One year after, he was already acting at the Théàtre des Arts, so if he ever was a member of the Comédie Française, then not for long. In 1911 he travelled around with Firmin Gémier’s wandering stage company, while at least from 1913 he settled in Paris playing with André Antoine’s 1913 staging of Paul Lindau’s The Prosecutor Hallers. At the same time Toulout debuted in French film, which quickly would become much more intense than his stage career. All-in all he would act in some 100 films within four decades.
Toulout started in short films by Abel Gance for Gance’s own company Le film français (Il y a des pieds au plafond, Le Nègre blanc, La Digue, Le Masque d’horreur, all 1912), but soon after he had also various parts at Gaumont, Pathé and smaller companies, under direction of Louis Feuillade (La Maison des lions, 1912), Henri Andréani (L’Homme qui assassina, 1913; Jacques l’honneur, 1913; Les Enfants d'Édouard, 1914), in addition to films directed by and Gaston Leprieur, René Leprince, Gérard Bourgeois and Alexandre Devarennes. For instance in L’homme qui assassina he is the evil, adulterous Lord Falkland [!], who presses his equally adulterous but goodhearted wife (Mlle Michelle) to either say goodbye to her child or publicly confess her sin, but her lover (Firmin Gémier) kills the husband and is even acquitted by the local Turkish commissionary (Adolphe Candé), who is very understanding in these matters. NB Les Enfants d'Édouard was of course based on Shakespeare.
While Toulout didn’t act on screen in 1915 (he may have been involved in the military during the First World War), he was back on track from later 1916 in several Gaumont films by Feuillade and others. In 1917 he played in Feuillade’s L’Autre, where he met the actress Yvette Andreyor, famous for her parts in Feuillade’s Fantomas and Judex, and they married in 12 June 1917. Toulout and Andreyor would perform together in various films until their divorce in 1926. In 1918 Toulout was the evil antagonist of Emmy Lynn in Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie, blackmailing her for having accidentally killed his sister, thus risking to wreck her new marriage with a composer (Séverin-Mars) but also the life of the composer’s daughter (Elizabeth Nizan). Luckily for the other he doesn’t kill them, only himself. As English Wikipedia writes, “Gance's mastery of lighting, composition and editing was accompanied by a range of literary and artistic references which some critics found pretentious and alienating.” While Toulout would be reunited with Emmy Lynn in La faute d’Odette Marchal (Henri Roussel 1920), he would also be reunited as – again – a jealous, evil husband with Séverin-Mars in Jacques Landauze (1920) by André Hugon, a director with whom Toulout would do several films in the 1920s and 1930s: in the 1920s Le Roi de Camargue (1921), Notre Dame d'amour (1922), Le Diamant noir (1922), La Rue du pavé d'amour (1923), and the first French sound film, Les Trois masques (1929), shot at the London Elstree studios in 15 days.
In the early 1920s Toulout also acted in films by Pierre Bressol (Le Mystère de la villa Mortain, La Mission du docteur Klivers), Germaine Dulac (La fète espagnole, La belle dame sans-merci), Jacques Robert, Henri Fescourt, Armand du Plessis, and others. In La belle dame sans-merci he is a local count who understands a playful femme fatale he brought home is wrecking his whole family, so he has them reunited. In Chantelouve (Georges Monca 1921) he was once more the jealous husband who threatens to kill his wife (Yvette Andreyor). In La conquête des Gaules (Yan B. Dyl, Marcel Yonnet, 1923) he is a film director who tries to film the conquest of the Gauls with modest means. In Le Crime de Monique (Robert Péguy 1923) Yvette Andreyor is accused of killing her brutal violent husband (Toulout, of course). Toulout also acted in Abel Gance’s hilarious comedy Au secours! (1924), starring Max Linder as a man who takes a bet to stay a night in a haunted house.
Instead Toulout masterfully performed the persistent commissionary Javert in Les Misérables (Henri Fescourt 1925), opposite Gabriel Gabrio as Jean Valjean. When a restored version was shown at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone in October 2015, Peter Walsh on his blog Burnt Retina wrote: “Gabriel Gabrio as Jean Valjean was a towering presence on screen, and his redemptive arc, and gradual aging were shown in a convincing way. Jean Toulout as Javert was also superb, at times overpowered by some of the mightiest brows and mutton chops I’ve seen in a long time. The climax of his personal crisis, and collapse of his moral world was incredibly striking, with extreme close-ups capturing a bristling performance.” After smaller parts as in Germaine Dulac’s Antoinette Sabrier (1927), in which Toulout would be paired with Gabrio again, Toulout left the set in 1928 and instead returned to the stage for Le Carnaval de l'amour at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin.
In 1929, however, Toulout returned as Mr de Villefort in the late silent film Monte Christo (Henri Fescourt) – the last big silent French production - as well as in the first French sound film Les Trois masques (see above) as a Corsican whose son (François Rozet) makes a girl (Renée Heribel) pregnant, after which her brothers take revenge during the carnival. Toulout had the lead in the Henry Bataille adaptation La Tendresse (André Hugon 1930) as a famous, older academician who discovers his much younger wife (Marcelle Chantal) isn’t that much in love with him as he is with her. When he gravely falls ill he discovers she still gave the best of her life to him. In 1930 Toulout also tried his luck in film direction and with Joe Francis he directed Le Tampon du Capiston, a comical operetta film on an old spinster (Hélène Hallier), a captain’s sister, who wants to marry the captain’s aide (Rellys) who presumably has inherited a fortune. In the same year Toulout also wrote the scripts for two other films, both by Hugon: La Femme et le Rossignol and Lévy & Cie. The collaboration continued in 1931 when Toulout scripted and starred in Hugon’s Le Marchand de sable, while he had a supporting part in Hugon’s La Croix du Sud. The collaboration with Hugon would last till well into the mid-1940s with Le Faiseur (1936), Monsieur Bégonia (1937), La Rue sans joie (1938), Le Héros de la Marne (1938), La Sévillane (1943), and Le Chant de l'exilé (1943). In 1931 Toulout also scripted Moritz macht sein Glück, a German film by Dutch director Jaap Speijer.
All through the 1930s Toulout had a steady, intense career as actor, but in 1934 he also directed his second film, La Reine du Biarritz, in which he himself had only a small part. Elenita de Sierra Mirador (Alice Field) is the toast of Biarritz. For her, a young groom leaves his wife. For her, a forty-year-old inflamed suddenly and deceives his young wife. But Elenita watched by her mother resigns herself to becoming honest and returns to her husband. Otherwise Toulout had mostly supporting parts, as in Le petit roi (1933) by Julien Duvivier, Fédora (1934) by Louis Gasnier, Les Nuits moscovites (Alexis Granowsky, 1934), and Le Bonheur (Marcel L’Herbier 1934). He could act the jealous, shooting husband again in Paul Schiller’s Le Vertige (1935), again starring Alice Field. He was the judge who forces Henri Garat and Lilian Harvey to marry on the spot in Les Gais lurons (Jacques Natanson/Paul Martin), the French version of Martin’s Glückskinder. He is the prosecutor in La Danseuse rouge (Jean-Paul Paulin 1937) , a courtcase drama starring Vera Korène and inspired by Mata Hari’s trial. Toulout continued to act minor film parts in the late 1930s, during the war years and the late 1940s and quite continuously: fathers, judges, doctors, officers, aristocrats. But a major part among the first three actors of the film he didn’t have anymore. Memorable were his parts in Édouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker 1951), starring Daniel Gélin and Anne Vernon, and – again, a judge - in Obsession (Jean Delannoy 1952) with Michèle Morgan and Raf Vallone. Toulout also worked as voice actor in France, playing Donald Crisp’s part in How Green Was My Valley (1941, released in France in 1946), and Nigel Bruce’s part in Limelight (1952). In the late 1950s Toulout also acted on television.
Jean Toulout died in Paris on 23 October 1962.
Sources: English, French and Italian Wikipedia, IMDB, DVD-Toile, burntretina.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/day-five-at-the-pord....