Nilda Duplessy

Biography

When Nilda Duplessy entered films in 1922, she had already been a Parisian stage actress for some time, most notably in revues by Rip at the theaters Capucines, Femina, and Vaudeville, where she could be seen in Le Bel Ange vint at the Theatre Michel and in Le Tracassin at the Potinière. Film director Gaston Roudès, impressed by her beauty, selected here for Le petit Moineau de Paris (1923), starring Régine Bouet, after which she returned to the stage. Robert Boudrioz called her back to films for the more substantial role of Marina de Dasetta opposite Sylvio De Pedrelli In L'Epervier (1925) in which she played the wife of an Hungarian aristocrat card cheat with whom a young French nobleman (Youcca Troubetzkoy) falls in love. The result was so convincing that Jean Kemm gave her the part of Irene de Nevers in the historical adventure film Le Bossu (1925). Duplessy confirmed her film acting abilitywith Barocco (1925) by Charles Burguet. After a three years absence, Duplessy returned to film acting again in 1929 in the late silent films Les capes noires (Gennaro Dini, 1929) starring Régine Bouet, at Coimbra, and in the Franco-Spanish-Mexican production El león de Sierra Morena (Miguel Contreras Torres, 1929) also with René Navarre, and shot in Spain. In the 1930s Duplessy acted in a few more films, but always in supporting roles, e.g. in 1933 in Moi et l'impératrice (Friedrich Hollaender, Paul Martin, 1933), the alternate-language version of Ich und die Kaiserin (1933), both starring Lilian Harvey, while Charles Boyer had the male lead in the French version. In Léon Mathot's Aloha/ Aloha, le chant des îles (1937) she played a nun, and in S.O.S. Sahara ( Jacques de Baroncelli, 1938) she was a friend of the protagonists. Her last role was in Le capitaine Benoît (Maurice de Canonge, 1938), starring Jean Murat and Mireille Ballin. No reliable data has been uncovered as to the dates of her birth and of her death.