Other names Josette Solvay Role Film actress Name Josette Day | Years active 1919–1950 Occupation Actor Children Hinano Tiatia Solvay | |
 | ||
Born July 31, 1914 ( 1914-07-31 ) Paris, France Died June 27, 1978, Paris, France Parents Simone Catutel, Andre Dagory Movies Beauty and the Beast, The Well‑Digger's Daughter, Les Parents terribles, Lucrezia Borgia, Swiss Tour Similar People Jean Marais, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Pagnol, Orane Demazis, Rene Clement | ||
Josette Day (Paris, July 31, 1914 - Paris, June 27, 1978) was a French film actress.
Born Josette Noëlle Andrée Claire Dagory, she began her career as an actress in 1919 at the age of five. Day was married in 1941 to famous French writer and director Marcel Pagnol, whom she met in January 1939.
In 1946, she played her best-known role, alongside Jean Marais, as Belle in Jean Cocteau's 1946 film Beauty and the Beast.
Her films include Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (1932), The Merry Monarch (based on Les Aventures du roi Pausole) (1933), Lucrèce Borgia (1935), L'homme du jour (1937), Accord final (1938), La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Les Parents terribles (1948).
Despite numerous parts in famous French films, Day ended her career as an actress in 1950 when only 36 years old. Divorced from Pagnol by then, she retired to marry wealthy chemical businessman, Maurice Solvay (descendant of Ernest Solvay, founder of the notable Solvay company). In February 1959 while on cruise in the Pacific, she and Solvay met a Tahitian girl at a Papeete market named Hinano Tiatia, whom the couple took under legal guardianship and who was the center of Solvay's inheritance dispute having not been formally adopted at the time of his sudden death in 1960.
