Lili Damita

Lili Damita was born in Blaye, France, on 10 July 1904. Her father was an officer.[2] She was educated in convents and ballet schools in her native France, as well as Spain and Portugal. At 14, she was enrolled as a dancer at the Opéra de Paris.[3]

As a teenager, she was performing in popular music halls, eventually appearing in the Revue at the Casino de Paris.[4] She worked as a photographic model. Offered a role in film as a prize for winning a magazine beauty competition in 1921, she appeared in several silent films before being offered her first leading role in Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925) by Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz.[5] She was an instant success, and Curtiz directed her in two more films: Fiaker Nr. 13 (1926) and Der goldene Schmetterling (1926).[6] Damita continued appearing next in German productions directed by Robert Wiene (Die große Abenteuerin; 1928),[7] G.W. Pabst (Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe; 1926) and British director Graham Cutts (The Queen Was in the Parlour; 1927).

In 1928, Damita was invited to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn and made her American film debut in The Rescue. She was leased out to various studios, appearing with stars and leading men such as Maurice Chevalier, Laurence Olivier, James Cagney, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. Her films included box office successes The Cock-Eyed World (1929),[8] the semi-silent The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) and This Is the Night (1932).[9]

Damita and husband Errol Flynn at Los Angeles airport, 1941

Following a lengthy affair with Curtiz,[10] she married unknown actor Errol Flynn in 1935 and retired from the screen. Flynn soon became one of Hollywood's biggest box office attractions, and in 1941 they had a son, Sean Flynn. The couple had an acrimonious divorce in 1942. According to her ex husband's memoir My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Damita was unstable and violent throughout the tumultuous relationship. She is portrayed by Barbara Hershey in the TV film My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1985) based on Flynn's autobiography.

While living in Palm Beach, Florida, Damita married Allen Loomis in 1962, a retired Fort Dodge, Iowa, dairy product manufacturer, and spent part of each year living there.[11] They divorced in the mid-80s.[12]

During the Cambodian Civil War (Khmer Rouge reign), her son Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time magazine when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on 6 April 1970.[13] Although Damita spent an enormous amount of money searching for her son, he was never found, and in 1984 he was declared legally dead.

Damita died of Alzheimer's disease on 21 March 1994, in Palm Beach, Florida, aged 89.[14] She was interred in the Oakland Cemetery in Fort Dodge, Iowa, her last husband's hometown.[15]

• On Dit Ça, Paris (1923)
• Sons o'Guns, New York (1929/30)
• Here's How, London (1934)

• Bermingham, Cedric Osmond (1931). Stars of the screen 1931: A volume of biographies of contemporary actors and actresses engaged in photoplay throughout the world. London, UK: Herbert Joseph.
• "Lily Damita". Stars of the Photoplay. Chicago: Photoplay Magazine. 1930.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lili Damita.

• Lili Damita at IMDb
• Lili Damita at the Internet Broadway Database
• Photographs of Lili Damita dead link
• Photographs and literature
• Grave of Lili Damita