Madeleine Lebeau

When Madeleine Lebeau died, she was the last surviving credited cast member of Casablanca. She was a mere nineteen when the movie was made, one of many refugees to appear in the film. She will always be remembered for the tears streaming down her face as she and others in Rick’s Place sing “La Marseillaise” to drown out the Germans’ singing of “Die Wacht am Rhein.” She and her then-husband, Marcel Dalio, had fled France the year before. The papers they held that would have let them into Chile turned out to be forgeries, and she was fortunate to be allowed into Canada and from there the US.

To my knowledge, there was nothing about Lebeau herself that would have necessarily attracted the Nazis’ ire. I’m not saying passing the war in France would have been fun for her, but the reason she was a refugee was that her husband was a Jew. She loved him, and she fled France with him. They were passengers on the steamship SS Quanza, many of whom had forged visas and many of whom were personally allowed into the US by Franklin Roosevelt on the behest of Eleanor. This enraged Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and made him even more determined to keep refugees out of the US.

Imagine living through that as barely an adult. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty that you and your husband—even if he filed for divorce during filming (he’s also in the movie)—were lucky and that quite a lot of other people weren’t. And imagine knowing that someone you hadn’t even met was angry enough that you were in the US to redouble his efforts to keep people out. No wonder she wept; no wonder her cry of “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” is so powerful even all these decades later. Perhaps, alas, more so than it has been in decades.

Because the script was in such flux during filming, the role of Yvonne started out bigger than it was in the finished film. Ilsa just became more important. She held no bitterness about it, just disappointment. But it’s impressive that she does as well as she does with the screentime she’s got given that Lebeau learned English on the Quanza. Perhaps Yvonne’s English wasn’t the best, but would it have been? Yvonne herself would have been young and possibly learned her English from Rick.

Lebeau returned to France after the war, unlike many other people in the movie. She did some acting in the US, though her contract was canceled around the time the movie was released, and then acted in French, Spanish and Italian as well as English. She ended up marrying Tullio Pinelli, who contributed to the screenplay of 8 ½ in which she appeared. She seems to have retired from acting in 1970, but it doesn’t matter. Frankly, it doesn’t matter that she was in 8 ½. What matters is her singing with tears streaming down her cheeks, overpowering the Nazis in the only way she can.