Germaine Rouer

Biography

Paris welcomed Germaine Rouer on 2 November 1897, and the city never really let her go. At eighteen she stepped before the cameras for Louis Feuillade’s sprawling crime serial Les Vampires, launching a career that glided from silent shadows into early sound. She graced the department-store fantasy of Ladies’ Paradise in 1930, then traded satin counters for the murky betrayals of Roger la Honte three years later. Ninety-seven winters after her first breath, she took her last, still in Paris, on 26 December 1994, leaving the city’s cinema with one more luminous ghost.