The Beauty Inside

When actress Wendy Gazelle showed up on the Auschwitz set of “Triumph of the Spirit,” her thick curly dark hair cascaded past her shoulders (“I’d never had short hair in my life”). Her role as Allegra, a young Greek concentration camp prisoner, changed all that.

Gazelle--love interest of Willem Dafoe, a Greek boxing champ forced by the Nazis to fight--and long-tressed Kelly Wolf, who plays her sister, were among the “prisoners” whose heads were shaved on camera.

Director Robert M. Young helped Gazelle prepare for the humiliating shaving scene the night before by telling the actress, “After this happens, we’ll look for you to be beautiful inside .’ ”

The sequence, calling for the women to be naked, was filmed on a closed set, with “SS women” hacking away at the hair of the prisoners and then shaving them. Gazelle had no trouble summoning up tears.

“Oh, God, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “But I tried to think like my character--who’s a survivor. I tried to think, ‘They’re taking away a material thing--but they can’t take away me.’ ”

When it was over, Young approached Gazelle with tears in his eyes and said, “I feel like a monster.”

Dafoe, Edward James Olmos, Robert Loggia and dozens of male extras suffered similarly.

In a show of solidarity, some non-actors associated with the movie also had their heads shaved--including Dean Pollack, on location filming a “Making of ‘Triumph of the Spirit’ ” documentary, and Evan Kopelson, producer of that project and son of “Triumph” producer Arnold Kopelson.