French actress and model Lise Bourdin, 99, died on Nov. 28. The sister of playwright Roland Bourdin, Lise worked various office jobs before being discovered by Pierre Balmain and shot to stardom as one of Paris’s most successful post-War models (“There were pictures of me everywhere. Sometimes I was on three magazine covers at the same time”). She enjoyed a brief but successful career in films and TV in the 1950s, including costarring with Sophia Loren in The River Girl, and as Madame X in Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper). “The press didn’t love me and I had a private life outside the arts,” Bourdin said a few years ago. “I thought I would never make the career I deserve, so I stopped.” Bourdin was briefly married to Brazilian industrialist Roberto Seabra, and was the partner of politician Raymond Marcellin from 1974 till his death in 2004.
