Martine Carol’s face seemed to always be poised in some stage of passion. A product of Sainte-Mande, France, Martine’s eyes were big enough to encompass and convey the entire gamut of love’s emotions, switching from joy to anguish and back to hope and then anticipation, all in the space of seconds, without once batting her lashes. Born in 1920, during the infancy of film, and coming to the screen in the early 1940s, during the adolescence of film, fair Martine served as mainly a support actress and a pin-up goddess with her buxom figure and plush lower lip. She was also rumored to have had a torrid affair with married actor Georges Marchal that ended with a suicide attempt on her part, via an alcohol and drug overdose and a jump into the Seine river. Luckily, Martine was reportedly saved by the taxi driver who took her to the river, and the details surrounding her attempt brought her a new level of fame. In 1949, she starred as Bettina Verdi in Les amants de Vérone (1949), aka The Lovers of Verona, where audiences got to glimpse her bare breasts. She took the role of Caroline de Bièvre in the French Revolution epic Caroline Cherie (1953), which was a major hit for the starlet, and included a few semi-nude scenes. She also starred as Lucrèce Borgia in the film of the same name in 1953, and gave good boob-bobbing in a pool. Martine made one film in Hollywood, co-starring with Van Johnson in Action of the Tiger (1957), but since Brigitte Bardot had already started catching the world’s attention, another hot French chick hardly seemed worth noticing. The blonde bombshell made a few more films in Italy and France, then retired from show business. Martine died of cardiac arrest in 1967 at the age of 46, and was buried in the cemetery of Cannes.
