Madeleine Lebeau dead: Last surviving Casablanca cast member dies aged 92
Lebeau is best known for her emotionally charged final scene where she shouts 'Vive la France!'
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Your support makes all the difference.Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving cast member of 1942 film Casablanca, has died at the age of 92.
Her stepson, filmmaker Carlo Alberto Pinelli, told The Hollywood Reporter she died on May 1 in Spain after breaking her thigh bone.
Lebeu is best known for her role as Yvonne, the jilted mistress of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, in the 40s Oscar-winning Warner Bro’s classic Casablanca.
Born in 1923, she fled Nazi-occupied France for Hollywood with her then husband and esteemed actor Marcel Dalio, in 1940. Once in Hollywood, the pair both appeared in Casablanca, with Dalio playing the croupier Emil.
Lebeau is best known for the teary-eared scene where she passionately shouts “Vive la France!” in her final line of the film. Many of the film's cast were refugees from Nazi terror and drew on real emotion and life experience.
She played in two further US films before returning to France after the war. There she appeared in 20 more films, going on to play a temperamental French actress in filmmaker Federico Fellini’s Oscar-winning 8 1/2 (1963), which her second husband co-wrote.
Her film career ended by the late 1960s and she remained in Rome after making 8 1/2. In 1988, she married Oscar-nominated Italian screenwriter Tullio Pinelli whom died in 2009.
Lebeau lived in Estepona in Spain at the time of her death.
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