Leslie Caron THE OLDIE OF THE YEAR

We think of Leslie Caron as a film star, a remarkable front-line survivor from the Hollywood era. But primarily, she is a dancer. Rightly elected the Oldie of the Year, at the age of 90 she is spry, full of life and remarkably sympathetic.

In her memoirs, she wrote, ‘Life compels me, just as it does everyone else, to face the decline that advancing age imposes, at the risk of turning bitter, and I see bitterness as a cancer of the soul.’

She went on to declare that she has refused to surrender to this. Trained as a dancer, she does her exercises every morning and has remained as trim and fit as ever. She defies the years.

Today you may catch here in a cameo role in a film, but you are more likely to find her at the Wigmore Hall, relaying her memories of Paris during the Occupation, before a concert of French music, or reciting poetry with an orchestra for Amelia Freedman and her Nash Ensemble.

She lived in Paris during the terrible 1940s, something she recreated memorably in a scene with Orson Welles in the film Is Paris Burning? (1966). So vivid was it, and so true to what she recalled – the German soldiers, the barking dogs, the survivors with numbers tattooed on their skins – that she retreated for several days to her hotel room to get over it.

So many of the stars of her generation were self-obsessed creations of the Hollywood machine, with a fortuitous appeal to the camera. Leslie Caron is nothing like that. She comes from that particularly rewarding, intellectual and artistic world of postwar Paris. She did not meet Colette, who wrote the novella Gigi, in which she later starred in 1958. But she knew Jean Cocteau, she danced in Roland Petit’s ballets and she danced with the great Jean Babilée.

Gene Kelly