44 Facts About Mel Ferrer

Melchor Gaston Ferrer was an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter.

Mel Ferrer achieved prominence on Broadway before scoring notable film hits with Scaramouche, Lili and Knights of the Round Table.

Mel Ferrer starred opposite his wife, actress Audrey Hepburn, in War and Peace, and produced her film Wait Until Dark.

Mel Ferrer acted extensively in European films, and appeared in several cult hits, including The Antichrist, The Suspicious Death of a Minor, The Black Corsair, and Nightmare City.

Mel Ferrer's father, Dr Jose Maria Ferrer, was born in Havana, Cuba, of Catalan ancestry.

Mel Ferrer was 59 years old at the time of Mel's birth and died three years later.

Mel Ferrer's US-born mother, Mary Matilda Irene, was a daughter of coffee broker Joseph J O'Donohue, New York's City Commissioner of Parks, a founder of the Coffee Exchange, and a founder of the Brooklyn-New York Ferry.

An ardent opponent of Prohibition, Irene Mel Ferrer was named in 1934 as the New York State chairman of the Citizens Committee for Sane Liquor Laws.

Mel Ferrer's parents married on October 17,1910, in New York.

Mel Ferrer's elder sister, Dr Maria Irene Ferrer, was a cardiologist and educator, who helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram.

Mel Ferrer died in 2004 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, at age 89 of pneumonia and congestive heart failure.

Mel Ferrer died at age 82 from a thoracic aneurysm.

Mel Ferrer was privately educated at the Bovee School in New York and Canterbury Prep School in Connecticut.

Mel Ferrer attended Princeton University until his sophomore year, when he dropped out to devote more time to acting.

Mel Ferrer worked as an editor of a small Vermont newspaper and wrote the children's book Tito's Hats.

Mel Ferrer began acting in summer stock as a teenager and in 1937 won the Theatre Intime award for best new play by a Princeton undergraduate; the play was called Awhile to Work and co-starred another college student, Frances Pilchard, who would become Mel Ferrer's first wife later the same year.

Mel Ferrer appeared as a chorus dancer in two unsuccessful musicals, Cole Porter's You Never Know and Everywhere I Roam.

Mel Ferrer's first acting roles were in a revival of Kind Lady and Cue for Passion.

Mel Ferrer was contracted to Columbia Pictures as a director, along with several other "potentials" who began as dialogue directors: Fred Sears, William Castle, Henry Levin and Robert Gordon.

Mel Ferrer directed The Girl of the Limberlost, starring Ruth Nelson.

Mel Ferrer then directed Jose Ferrer in the 1946 stage production of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mel Ferrer worked as an assistant on The Fugitive, directed by John Ford in Mexico.

Mel Ferrer made his screen acting debut with a starring role in Lost Boundaries, playing a black person who passes for white.

Mel Ferrer had a supporting role in Born to Be Bad at RKO, directed by Nicholas Ray.

Mel Ferrer starred as a bullfighter in The Brave Bulls for Robert Rossen at Columbia.

Mel Ferrer fought with Arthur Kennedy over Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious, directed by Fritz Lang at RKO.

Mel Ferrer went to MGM, replacing Fernando Lamas as the villain in Scaramouche.

The film, particularly notable for a long, climactic sword fight between Mel Ferrer and Stewart Granger, was a huge hit.

Saadia, which Mel Ferrer made with Cornel Wilde, was a flop, but Knights of the Round Table, in which Mel Ferrer played King Arthur, was another hit.

Mel Ferrer met actress Audrey Hepburn at a party; she wanted to do a play together.

Mel Ferrer went to Italy to make Proibito and to England for Oh.

Mel Ferrer returned to MGM to make The Vintage with Pier Angeli, which was a big flop.

Mel Ferrer made two films for 20th Century Fox: an all-star adaptation of The Sun Also Rises and Fraulein, a war story with Dana Wynter.

Mel Ferrer went to Italy to star in Roger Vadim's vampire movie Blood and Roses.

Mel Ferrer was one of several stars in The Devil and the Ten Commandments and The Longest Day.

Mel Ferrer had a cameo in his wife's Paris When It Sizzles and was Marcus Aurelius Cleander in The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Mel Ferrer then turned to television, doing some directing for the series The Farmer's Daughter starring Inger Stevens, William Windom, and Cathleen Nesbitt.

Mel Ferrer played a blackmailing reporter in the Columbo episode "Requiem for a Fallen Star", starring Anne Baxter.

Mel Ferrer appeared opposite Cyd Charisse in an episode of the long-running Angela Lansbury series, Murder She Wrote, and appeared in two television miniseries, Peter the Great and Dream West.

Mel Ferrer produced and starred in the biopic El Greco, playing the famous painter.

Mel Ferrer produced Wait Until Dark, starring his wife, another big hit.

Mel Ferrer was mostly a jobbing actor in the 1970s, working much in Italy.

Mel Ferrer worked in two of Spanish actress Marisol's film vehicles: Cabriola and La chica del molino rojo, being the director of the first and acting in the second.

Mel Ferrer married five times, to four women, with whom he had six children.