ACTOR
Charles Boyer
37 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (37)
- #001
Two days after his wife's death, and two days before what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday, Charles Boyer took a lethal dose of barbiturates.
- #002
Chuck Jones used Charles Boyer's French voice and mannerisms when creating the famous cartoon skunk Pépé Le Pew.
- #003
In his twenties, Charles Boyer was half bald and wore a toupee only for film roles. He never wore one in public.
- #004
Charles Boyer earned a philosophy degree from the Sorbonne.
- #005
In addition to English and French, Charles Boyer also spoke German, Italian and Spanish.
- #006
Charles Boyer became a United States citizen in 1942.
- #007
Charles Boyer's favorite film was the romantic drama Love Affair (1939).
- #008
Charles Boyer had one son, Michael Charles Boyer (born December 9, 1943), who committed suicide on September 21, 1965. It appears he played Russian roulette with a .38-caliber pistol after an argument with a girlfriend.
- #009
Charles Boyer's right side of his face was always considered the more expressive, and he was consistently photographed from that side until the end of his film career.
- #010
In 1941, Charles Boyer founded the French Research Foundation, a French research library used in pre-production work for films. During World War II he moved his library to West Hollywood and used it to research costumes, buildings and furniture of French history for his film Arch of Triumph (1946).
- #011
For films released in 1937 and 1938, Charles Boyer lost the Academy Award for Best Actor to Spencer Tracy two years in a row.
- #012
In 1964, Charles Boyer was vice president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.
- #013
In 1928, Charles Boyer signed a deal with Ufa in Berlin to make French-language versions of German films.
- #014
Charles Boyer studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and drama at the Paris Conservatory.
- #015
Charles Boyer reportedly turned down offers to appear in If I Were King (1938), The Great Waltz (1938) and Wuthering Heights (1939).
- #016
Charles Boyer appeared in six Academy Award nominees for Best Picture: Love Affair (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), Hold Back the Dawn (1941), Gaslight (1944), Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and Fanny (1961); Around the World in 80 Days was the only winner.
- #017
Charles Boyer's surname is pronounced "Boy-yay." He often wrote the pronunciation in parentheses, and eventually became famous enough that most people pronounced it correctly.
- #018
Anatole Litvak considered Charles Boyer the best actor he had ever worked with.
- #019
On February 8, 1960, Charles Boyer was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
- #020
After his death, Charles Boyer was buried alongside his wife Pat Paterson at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
- #021
Director Leo McCarey wrote the Michael part in Love Affair with Charles Boyer in mind, and Charles listed it as his favorite of his films; it led to a lifelong friendship with his co-star Irene Dunne, and they made two more films together — Tomorrow Never Comes and Together Again.
- #022
Charles Boyer married the English actress Pat Paterson, whom he met at a dinner party in 1934. They became engaged after a two-week courtship and married three months later. They later moved from Hollywood to Paradise Valley, Arizona. The marriage lasted 44 years, until his death. The couple's only child, Michael Charles Boyer (9 December 1943 – 23 September 1965), killed himself at the age of 21 after breaking up with his girlfriend.
- #023
He also appeared as himself on the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy.
- #024
Boyer received an offer from Paramount for a small role in The Magnificent Lie (1931), directed by Berthold Viertel and starring Ruth Chatterton opposite him. It was his first English-speaking role.
- #025
In 1933 he scored a great success on the Paris stage in "Le Bonheur". It would be his last appearance on the Paris stage.
- #026
In November 1939 Boyer was discharged from the army and returned to Hollywood because the French government thought he would be more useful in film production.
- #027
Boyer's last performance was in A Matter of Time (1976), directed by Vincente Minnelli, in which he appeared with Liza Minnelli and Ingrid Bergman.
- #028
Charles Boyer returned from the United States to France to make Le corsaire (1939) for Marc Allégret. He was shooting the film in Nice when France declared war on Germany in September 1939. Production was halted upon the declaration of war. Boyer joined the French army. The film was never completed, though some of its footage was later released.
- #029
His later work included the musical remake of Lost Horizon (1973) and the French film Stavisky (1974), in which the lead was played by Jean-Paul Belmondo; it won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor[3] and also a Special Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
- #030
Boyer was a shy small-town boy who discovered cinema and theater at the age of eleven.
- #031
He appeared with Annabella in "La bataille" (1933). The film was also shot in an English-language version titled "The Battle", in which Merle Oberon replaced Annabella and Boyer reprised his role.
- #032
On 26 August 1978, Boyer killed himself at the age of 78 with an overdose of Seconal at a friend's house in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was taken to a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, two days after his wife's death from cancer, and died there. He was buried with his wife and son at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
- #033
Boyer was first brought to Hollywood by MGM, which wanted him to play Chester Morris's role in the French-language version of The Big House (1930), Révolte dans la prison (1931).
- #034
Boyer went to Broadway, where he made his stage debut in Red Gloves (1948–49), adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre's Dirty Hands, which ran for 113 performances.
- #035
Boyer's son had died in 1965, and Boyer found continuing to live in Los Angeles traumatic, so in March 1970 he decided to move to Europe.
- #036
Boyer became a United States citizen in Los Angeles on 15 June 1942.
- #037
In 1952 he won Broadway's 1951 Special Tony Award for Don Juan in Hell. The actor Charles Laughton directed it. Laughton took the role of the Devil; Cedric Hardwicke played the statue of the military commander killed by Don Juan, and Agnes Moorehead played Dona Anna, the commander's daughter and one of Juan's former conquests. The production was a critical success and was later recorded in full by Columbia Masterworks, one of the first complete recordings ever made of a non-musical stage production. As of 2006, however, it had never been released on CD, though in 2009 it became available as an MP3 download.
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