Georges Flateau

Biography

Paris welcomed Georges Flateau on 11 November 1881, and the city never really let him go. Between the two wars he slipped into the skin of conspirators and counts for the camera, most memorably in Louis Feuillade’s serial whirlwinds Judex (1916) and its 1917 prologue-plus-episode L’ombre mystérieuse, then again in Maurice Tourneur’s velvet-cloaked Katia (1938). After four decades of silents and early talkies, he took his final bow in the same streets where he first learned to mimic the world, dying quietly in Paris on 12 February 1953.