Dora Doll

Origins and early life

Dora Doll was born Dorothea Hermina Feinberg in Berlin on 19 May 1922, the daughter of a Jewish Russian banker driven out by the revolution of 1917; the family had fled Russia for Germany, and left Germany in turn for France as the Nazis came to power. She studied at the Conservatoire in Paris under Louis Jouvet and began working in films at the end of the 1930s, a Jewish girl of German birth beginning a French career in the worst possible year for both facts.

Work and career

Her career then ran for nearly seventy years, from Manon and Casque d'or through Razzia sur la chnouf and Les Grandes Familles to more than a hundred and fifty films and television parts. She was at her strongest in the 1950s and 1960s, cast again and again as the woman who has seen everything and says so, and worked with Jacques Becker, Henri Verneuil, Claude Autant-Lara and Jean-Pierre Melville. A whole new audience found her at seventy-five in the television series Cap des Pins, broadcast from 1998 to 2000.

She retired to the Camargue in 2007, later fell into financial difficulty, and died at her home in Nîmes on 15 November 2015, at ninety-three.