Nelly Cormon

Biography

Tall and elegant, with harmonious features, a proud look and brown curly hair, Nelly Cormon was a French theater actress of classic beauty who was very successful on stage for three decades and had a brief but honorable career in silent films at the time when cinema was beginning to become more artistic, not just a fairground art. Born in the center of France to a teacher and his wife on 15-12-1977, young Nelly studied music and drama at the Conservatoire from a young age and left it a prize in hand. In the wake of it, she started performing and soon landed important roles in major theaters (the Gymnase, the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, the Théâtre des Arts, the Théâtre Fémina) as well as on tour in Lisbon, London, Nancy, Brussels and other towns. Among the plays she graced with her presence can be counted "Pour la Couronne" (François Coppée), "Samson" (Henry Bernstein), "Le Maître de forges" (Georges Ohnet), "Le Retour de Jerusalem", "La Barricade, "Le Réveil", "Mademoiselle Josette, ma femme", "L'Homme enchaîné", "Napoléon IV"... Cinema also occupied her for a while (from 1910 to 1918) when she starred in two dozens quality films for the Film d'Art company. On several occasions a historical figure (Madame de La Bédoyer, Marion Delorme, Joséphine de Beauharnais, Madame Récamier), she showed the extent of her talent by being in turns the evil Milady de Winter in Calmettes and Pouctal's "Les Trois mousquetaires" (1912) and the truthful Mercedes, Edmond Dantes' fiancée, in "Le Comte de Monte Cristo", also directed by Henri Pouctal, also adapted from Alexandre Dumas (1915). But after a new interpretation of the courtesan Marion Delorme in 1918, the cinema parenthesis closed, probably at the end of her contract, and Nelly Cormon's reappearance in "Madame Récamier" ten years later remained without follow-up. The actress naturally went on with her successful theater career until she retired by the end of the 1920s. Curiously, from then on, all track of her is lost. Nobody knows yet where she lived and died despite serious research on the subject. A mystery probably due to the destruction of the municipal archives of the place where she lived. Whatever the case may be, Nelly Cormon will be remembered as an actress who featured greatly during the first quarter of the twentieth century.