Anne_Chevalier
Anne Chevalier
American actress
Anne Chevalier (also known as Reri; 1912–1977) was a French-Tahitanian actress, singer and dancer.
Anna Irma Ruahrei Chevalier, born in 1912, was the seventh child to a Frenchman Laurence Chevalier and his Polynesian wife. She received education from a Catholic girls' school at Papeete.[1] At age 16, Chevalier was spotted by German director F.W. Murnau who was looking for a Polynesian girl to play the lead role in his silent film Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), whose story revolved around the fate of a couple when the young girl Reri is to be offered as a sacred maiden to Gods.[2]Tabu has been lauded as "one of the last of the great silent films".[3] Chevalier went to the United States for promoting the film and spent nearly a year there, appearing in the 1931 Broadway show of Ziegfeld Follies and visiting several Hollywood studios.[1][3] From there, she went to Europe for Tabu's premiere in Berlin and also performed at dance shows in Paris and Warsaw.[1]
Chevalier's second film role was opposite Eugeniusz Bodo in the Polish romantic drama Black Pearl (1934). She played a Tahitian woman who marries a Polish sailor and becomes a dancing sensation in her quest to gain acceptance by her husband's society. Ohio state censor banned the film, citing their policy against interracial marriage.[4] Three years later, she made a brief appearance in John Ford's The Hurricane, another film set in the South Seas.[5]
During her stay in Europe, Chevalier was romantically involved with her Black Pearl co-star Eugeniusz Bodo. Polish media even referred to her as his wife, but the couple soon separated and Chevalier returned to Tahiti. She died there in 1977.[1]
- Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)
- Black Pearl (1934)
- The Hurricane (1937)
- Tomczyk, Mirela (2016). "Reri – miss Polinezji wśród gwiazd II RP" [Reri – miss Polynesia among the stars of the Second Republic]. Stare Kino (in Polish). Archived from the original on 15 January 2019. Retrieved 10 November 2017.
- Brawley, Sean; Dixon, Chris (2015). The South Seas: A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour. Lexington Books. p. 195. ISBN 978-0-7391-9336-5.
- Eagan, Daniel (2010). America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry. A&C Black. pp. 183, 185. ISBN 978-0-8264-2977-3.
- Scott, Ellen C. (2015). Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. Rutgers University Press. p. 1794. ISBN 978-0-8135-7292-5.
- Sue Matheson (2019). The John Ford Encyclopedia. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 149.