Pierre Finaly

Origins and early life

Pierre Auguste Finaly was born in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on 7 August 1889, into a Hungarian Jewish family, and died at Asnières-sur-Seine on 4 April 1937, at the age of forty-seven.

Work and career

He was a first cousin once removed of the banker Horace Finaly, who ran the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas between the wars. He came to the stage first, playing between 1913 and 1930 at the Théâtre de l'Odéon and the Théâtre de Paris among other houses. From 1920 he worked steadily in the cinema and appeared in more than seventy films before his death in 1937, crossing the whole passage from the silent screen to the talking picture.

He worked with Abel Gance and with Max Ophüls, and his parts ran from small silhouettes to named roles such as the duc de Mayenne in La Dame de Monsoreau. He married Thérèse Schwab in July 1916 and is buried in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, in Paris. His career belongs to that generation of Jewish actors of the French screen whose names the credits carried without comment, in the years just before that became impossible.