Jean-Pierre Aumont; Suave French Actor in Movies, TV

Jean-Pierre Aumont, the suave, debonair actor whose seven-decade career on American and continental stage, screen and television ranged from “Lili” with Leslie Caron to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” to the 1998 television miniseries “The Count of Monte Cristo,” has died. He was 90.

Aumont died Tuesday in his home in Saint-Tropez on the French Riviera.

Among Aumont’s films were “The Song of Scheherazade” in 1947, “The Seven Deadly Sins” in 1962, “The Happy Hooker” in 1975 and “Jefferson in Paris” in 1995. His Broadway shows included “Tovarich” with Vivien Leigh and “Camino Real” with Al Pacino.

Born Jean-Pierre Salomons in Paris on Jan. 5, 1911, the actor was trained classically at the Paris Conservatory of Drama. He began his stage and film career in France, with a film debut in the 1932 “Jean de la Lune.”

Aumont was a real-life hero as a lieutenant in the Free French Army during World War II, serving in Belgium before France fell to Germany, and returning to fight in North Africa after a couple of years performing in the United States.

He first came to America in 1942 to perform in the Broadway play “Rose Burke” with Katharine Cornell. An MGM talent scout then brought him to Hollywood, where he made his American debut film, “Assignment in Brittany,” and “The Cross of Lorraine” before returning to uniform.

“Any man of my age who is not in the war would, I am sure, eventually feel that he had missed something that belonged to this period of history. His life would not be complete,” he told The Times in 1943.

Aumont, who was wounded twice after reentering France with American troops, earned the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.

Divorced in 1940 from French actress Blanche Montel, Aumont met and married his second wife during his first tour in Hollywood. She was actress Maria Montez, who died of a heart attack at age 32 in their Paris home in 1951, and was the mother of his daughter Maria Christina, better known as the European actress Tina Aumont. Montez acted with her husband in “Atlantis” and several movies in France and Italy.

After Montez’s death, Aumont said he wanted to divide his time between stage and films and Europe and America for the remainder of his career. He stuck to that plan, singing in his own nightclub show for a time in New York and Chicago, and performing regularly in plays and more than 60 films throughout Europe and the United States.

In Southern California, he appeared in such plays as “Incident at Vichy” in 1965 at Hollywood’s Huntington Hartford Theater, and as Emile du Becque in “South Pacific” at West Covina’s now-defunct Carousel Theater in 1968.

He also wrote several books, including a couple of novels and a 1976 autobiography, “Sun and Shadow,” with an introduction by the French director Francois Truffaut, for whom Aumont worked in “Day for Night.”