Melchior Gastón Ferrer

 Melchior Gastón Ferrer (August 25, 1917 – June 2, 2008)

Ferrer began acting in summer stock as a teenager and in 1937 won the Theatre Intime award for best new play by a Princeton undergraduate; the play was called Awhile to Work and co-starred another college student, Frances Pilchard, who would become Ferrer's first wife that same year. At age twenty-one, he was appearing on the Broadway stage as a chorus dancer, making his debut there as an actor two years later. He appeared as a chorus dancer in two unsuccessful musicals, Cole Porter's You Never Know and Everywhere I Roam. His first acting roles were in a revival of Kind Lady (1940) and Cue for Passion (1940), directed by Otto Preminger. Among the films he worked on were Louisiana Hayride (1944), They Live in Fear (1944), Sergeant Mike (1944), Together Again (1944), Meet Miss Bobby Socks (1944), Let's Go Steady (1944), Ten Cents a Dance (1945), and A Thousand and One Nights (1945). He was John Ford's assistant on The Fugitive (1947). He is best remembered for the role of the lame puppeteer in Lili (1953) and as Prince Andrei in War and Peace (1956). He directed Claudette Colbert in The Secret Fury (1950) and Audrey Hepburn - his wife at the time - in Green Mansions (1959). Ferrer produced the hit Wait Until Dark (1967), also with Hepburn.

In Europe, he was in The Visitor (1979), Island of the Fishmen (1980), Nightmare City (1980), The Great Alligator River (1980) and Eaten Alive! (1980). He went to Germany for Lili Marleen (1981). Ferrer was married five times, to four women, with whom he had six children. His fourth wife was Audrey Hepburn. A resident of Carpinteria, California, Ferrer died of heart failure at a convalescent home in Santa Barbara on June 2, 2008. He was 90 years old.