Jeanne Helbling

Personal

Vocation

French film and stage actress, film director, and singer, who began her career in the cinema in 1920, and in the following year obtained consistent roles in four silent films (released in 1922). She then regularly performed until 1940, before two last films in 1945 and 1946. She married a French-born American, Henri Garin, with whom she settled permanently in the United States. At the time of the German occupation of Paris in 1940, Jeanne Helbling entered the Resistance under the name of Chantal. Although worried by the Gestapo, Helbling managed to emerge from the Second World War without hindrance and received honours from both liberated France (in particular from General de Gaulle) and the United Kingdom (decorated with the Order of The British Empire, among other things, for having hosted the English agent Forest Yeo-Thomas, known as Shelley or The White Rabbit, at her home on each of his visits to France). She died on 6 August 1985, aged 82, in New York, New York. Link to Wikipedia biography