Constant Rémy

Constant Rémy (1882-1957) was a French actor and director, who played in 66 films and many stage productions. At Pathé, he acted in around fifteen short films before the First World War, including one of the first French Westerns, La conscience du Cheval Rouge (1913). Later, Rémy made several silent films with director Gaston Roudès. His peak was in the 1930s when he acted in nearly thirty high-quality films. His sixty-sixth and last film was La tour de Nesle (1954) by Abel Gance


French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 256.


French publicity still by Films Osso. Albert Préjean and Constant Rémy in Un soir de rafle/Night Raid (Carmine Gallone, 1930). Statens Filmcensur refers to the Danish Film censorship institution that took its final form with the Danish Cinema Act of 1938.

Focus on historical drama

Constant Rémy was born in 1882 in Paris, France. Though his father wanted him to become a doctor, Rémy selected the stage. He made his debut at the Gaité Montparnasse. Eager to prove himself, he acted all over France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Algeria before WWI. During WWI, he was imprisoned in Belgium and once released, he was forced to sing operetta for the liberated Belgians. Back in Paris he returned to the stage and had enormous success with 'La Rafale' which had 175 reprisals. He also was successful in vaudeville with 'J'avais une Marraine' at the Marigny theatre.

Rémy started acting in cinéma in his twenties. He focused on historical drama. He made his film debut for Pathé Frères in the short period piece Benvenuto Cellini (Albert Capellani, Camille de Morlhon, 1908). Then he also acted at Gaumont, and finally at Eclipse, where he stayed for some time. At Eclipse, he started to work with director Gaston Roudès, with whom he would often collaborate during his career. Their first film together was Sa petite fille (Gaston Roudès, 1911).

Another director with whom Rémy often worked at Eclipse was Henri Desfontaines. Rémy appeared at Eclipse also in modern dramas and Westerns, and he acted opposite such actors as Joë Hamman, Aimée Tessandier, and Germaine Dermoz. In an interview in Cinémagazine in the 1920s, Rémy reminded the nerve-wracking stunts he had to do with Roudès in those wild-west-like years of early cinema. Between 1914 and 1918, Rémy stopped film acting, probably because of the war, and only appeared in one film, Le baron mystère (Maurice Challiol, 1918).

From 1920 Rémy had again a steady career in film acting, though he didn't make too many films per year. Opposite France Dhélia, he had a major part in the drama of jealousy, L'ombre du bonheur (Gaston Roudès, 1924). He played the title character in Altemer le cynique (Georges Monca, 1924), about a beautiful harbour den dancer, Gina Zunga (Geneviève Félix), who is in the grip of a brutal character, Albéric Altemer. Despite her attraction to a young, naive lawyer (Fernand Herrmann), she cannot escape the fatal force of crime. Herrmann, Felix and Rémy played together again in L'ironie du sort/The Irony of Fate (Maurice Kéroul, Georges Monca, 1924).

Gaston Roudès gave him another lead in La Douleur (1925), also with France Dhélia and Lucien Dalsace. Albert-Francis Bertoni directed him in Les frères Zemganno (1926), which evolved in the circus world and was based on a novel by Edmond de Goncourt. Roudès let Rémy star again opposite - again - Dhélia in Le chemin de la gloire (Gaston Roudès, 1927), about a doctor who discovers a serum against cancer and tests it on one of his patients. Henri Debain gave him a supporting part in a Huguette Duflos vehicle, Chantage (1927) and an important role in Hara-Kiri (Henri Debain, Marie-Louise Iribe, 1928). It was Rémy's last silent film.


French card by EPC.

An easy passage to sound film

Two years later, after sound cinema had set in, Constant Rémy's first film part was in the French version of the German-English disaster film Atlantic, called Atlantis (1930), directed by Ewald André Dupont et Jean Kemm. The film was shot by British International Pictures at Elstree Studios, the first European studio to be equipped for sound film recording. Such multiple-language versions were common in the early years of sound before dubbing became a more established practice. Atlantis, inspired by the Titanic disaster, was cinematographed by the reputed Charles Rosher, while Alice Field and Maxime Desjardins were Rémy's co-actors. Thanks to his diction skills from the stage, Rémy fairly easily made the passage into French sound film.

In the years 1933-1936, he did several films per year, including three films with Gaston Roudès: Roger la Honte (1933), Le Petit Jacques/Little Jacques (1934), and Le chant de l'amour (1935). Roger la Honte, based on a novel by Jules Mary, narrates the events of a man unjustly accused, taking the blame for his mistress, Julia de Noirville (France Dhélia). He escapes from prison and goes into hiding for years. Then he poses as a rich American and manages to unmask the real murderer. In many films, he was among the three to five top names in the cast, e.g. Un soir de rafle/Night Raid (Carmine Gallone, 1930), La Femme nue/The Naked Woman (Jean-Paul Paulin, 1932), L'Agonie des aigles/The Death Agony of the Eagles (Roger Richebé, 1933), and Les Mystères de Paris/Mysteries of Paris (Félix Gandéra, 1935).

Rémy had leads in La robe rouge/The Red Robe (Jean de Marguenat, 1933), La Rue sans nom/Street Without a Name (Pierre Chenal, 1934), Son autre amour/His Other Love (Alfred Machin, Constant Rémy, 1934) - which he co-directed -, and Poliche (Abel Gance, 1934). In the latter, he is a man who pretends to be a party guy but proves to be seriously in love with a woman (Marie Bell). His peak continued with the lead in Sous la griffe (Christian-Jaque, 1935), about a circus director who falls in love with his adopted daughter, the male lead opposite Madeleine Renaud in Hélène (Jean Benoît-Lévy, Marie Epstein, 1936), and again in Les petites alliées (Jean Dréville, 1936), and the lead in Passeurs d'hommes (René Jayet, 1937) about Belgians fleeing to the Netherlands during WWI.

Rémy had the lead as a colonel in the Foreign Legion in Les hommes sans nom/The Men Without Names (Jean Vallée, 1937) and again played a commander in Ceux de demain (Adelqui Millar, Georges Pallu, 1938). He accused himself of murder to save his son in the court case film La goualeuse/Street Singer (Fernand Rivers, 1938), while he had a supporting part in another Foreign Legion film, Le chemin de l'honneur/Path of Honor (Jean-Paul Paulin, 1939). In the war years, Rémy only acted in two films. Espoirs.../Hopes... (1941) was about two fathers (Rémy and Larquey) who oppose the relationship of Robert Lynen with Jacqueline Roman. In Monsieur des Lourdines (Pierre de Hérain, 1943) based on Chateaubriant, Rémy was the title character.

After WWII, only a handful of parts followed: Les clandestins/Clandestine (André Chotin, 1946), Les gosses mènent l'enquête/The Kids Are Leading the Investigation (Maurice Labro, 1947) - a high school suicide drama in which Rémy had an important part, Si Versailles m'était conté.../Royal Affairs in Versailles (Sacha Guitry, 1954) - in which Rémy played La Reynie, founding father of the French criminal police - and the period piece La tour de Nesle/Tower of Nesle (Abel Gance, 1955). In addition, Rémy had a rich stage career, acting at the Comédie Française in the 1920s, and also was highly active in music hall and vaudeville in the 1920s (which he claimed himself was a much better pay), but extending his stage performances well into the early 1950s. In the early 1930s, he also worked as a voice actor. Constant Rémy died in 1957 in Cannes, France. He was 75.


French postcard, no. 73.


French postcard by A.N., Paris, no. 1059. Photo: Intran Studio.

Sources: Cineressources (French), Wikipedia (French and English) and IMDb.