The great beauty who dominated French cinema

For generations of French moviegoers, Danielle Darrieux was the undisputed queen of Gallic cinema. During her eightdecade career, the elegant actress starred in more than 100 films and embodied numerous onscreen archetypes: In the 1930s she was the freshfaced teen ingénue, in the ’40s and ’50s the romantic temptress, and in later life the indomitable grande dame. Fiery and radiant in films such as 1953’s The Earrings of Madame de..., in which she played a society lady torn between her husband and her lover, she was reserved in real life, preferring to live out of the spotlight in the French countryside. “I am very simple, perhaps too simple for all this,” Darrieux said in 1972. “This whole thing, the interviews, it’s too much for me.” The daughter of an army doctor and his concertsinger wife, Darrieux was born in Bordeaux and raised in Paris, said The Times (U.K.). Her “film break came when she was 13 and was cast in the 1931 comedy-drama Le Bal.” She appeared in 20 more films over the next five years, making her deepest impression in 1936’s Mayerling as the doomed mistress of Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf. Darrieux’s Hollywood debut came two years later, opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the screwball comedy The Rage of Paris. “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong!” the posters proclaimed. But her sweetheart status was threatened during World War II, said The Washington Post, when she angered the French Resistance by working for the Nazi-controlled production company Continental Films. She and her husband, Dominican diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa, were once shot at while driving in occupied Paris, “prompting them to move outside the city limits for the next few years.” Darrieux fought to clear her name after the war, arguing that “she’d been forced to do the films because of death threats against Rubirosa,” and resumed a wildly varied career, said The New York Times. She was James Mason’s spying accomplice in 1952’s 5 Fingers and a sexually frustrated aristocrat in a 1955 French version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She continued acting into her 90s and remained humble about her success. “I have always put more effort into my private life than my career,” she said in 2004. “I never thought it was forever, or that I was amazing.”

Born in Hardy, Neb., Hale played baseball as a boy, “but was more interested in boxing, football, basketball, and track,” said The New York Times. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he studied physiology at Springfield College in Massachusetts. He spent five years on the school’s faculty before joining Little League in 1955 on a temporary assignment. “I took a year-and-a-half leave of absence,” he said in 1985, “and I’m still on it.”

Hale decided to redesign Little League helmets after he blasted baseballs at the old headgear at 100 mph using a homemade air cannon, said The Washington Post. “The helmets broke apart on impact.” Hale became the league’s president in 1973, and two years later the organization began allowing girls to play—a decision he initially opposed. He later came to regret his stance, especially after his greatgranddaughter was named to an all-star team. Letting girls onto the diamond, he said, was “one of the greatest things that ever happened to Little League.”