FilmObituaryMarpessa Dawn and Breno Mello
Actor briefly famous as Eurydice in the cult movie Black Orpheus
The actor Marpessa Dawn, who has died aged 74, played the exotic and mysterious female lead in the 1958 Academy award-winning film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). Known throughout her life simply as Marpessa, she would never fulfil the promise of that performance as the doomed Eurydice, on whom the devil has staked a claim, but she left an indelible impression on a large following of enthusiasts. Ironically, her co-star, the fellow unknown, Breno Mello, died unexpectedly just 41 days before her death (see below right).
Dawn's Afro-Brazilian good looks were stunning. She and the handsome Mello, who played the tram driver bearing the name Orpheus, made an arresting couple on magazine covers and on a big-selling Columbia label LP record cover. The naturalness of their acting and the exciting music helped the film gain the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Dawn's celebrity was further helped by her marriage to the film's French director, Marcel Camus.
She enjoyed several years of public attention as Black Orpheus joined the international arts cinema circuit. But the film turned out to be her only brush with fame. It did present some opportunities for her to appear on US talk shows, but as time went by, opportunities became fewer. With Camus she drifted towards Europe.
Dawn was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, she visited England and continental Europe, where she met and married Camus. After Black Orpheus, his own train also hit the buffers, and he made little else of note in the succeeding years. According to her daughter, Dhyana Kluth, Dawn later stayed in Europe, remarried, and took bit-part roles, on stage or on film, most of them in non-English-speaking roles.
One of her last appearances was in a 2005 documentary Vinicius, on the life of the bossa nova pioneer Vinicius de Moraes, who wrote the original text for what became the screenplay of Black Orpheus. Dawn can be seen, somewhat mysteriously, in a small snippet of archive footage from the film that made her famous.
She is survived by Dhyana and her four other children.
Marpessa Dawn Menor, actor, born January 3 1934; died August 25 2008
Gifted Brazilian actor whose early potential went unfulfilled
The single, towering acting achievement of the Brazilian Breno Mello, who has died aged 76, was his portrayal of Orpheus in the 1958 film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), a retelling of the ancient Greek tragedy which sees Orpheus drawn to the gates of Hades in search of his beloved Eurydice.
Black Orpheus used a brilliantly florid process called Eastmancolor, and a backdrop of the pulsating streets of Rio de Janeiro at the time of the carnival and the shanty towns on the precarious slopes of the Sugar Loaf mountain. For a time in the 1960s, it seemed to have energised half the university students of Europe and the US into gyrating Cariocan street dancers.
The half-dozen main actors in the film were themselves all amateurs, led by Mello, in real life a happy-go-lucky footballer in his 20s who dreamed of becoming another Pelé, then in his prime. Apart from his co-star Marpessa Dawn and the director, her husband Marcel Camus, two other talents involved in the film whose contribution to the popularisation of Brazilian music was inestimable were the composers and guitarists Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Their volcanic musical score, a precursor to the more sedate bossa nova movement of the 1960s, is one of the most rhythmic in film-making up to that time, the kind of score every jazz fan dreams of hearing on a cinema sound system. The samba beat explodes down the streets and across Rio's marketplaces. When Mello retrieves a guitar from the pawnshop, and starts to sing Manhã de Carnaval and Felicidade, the instrument becomes a talisman for the joy of life.
Mello's Harry Belafonte-like good looks and natural talent should have secured him a long career in Brazilian theatre and movie-making; in truth, he was as gifted on the stage and in movie studios as he was on the football pitch. But he only appeared in six films, among them Os Vencidos (1963), San Rata de Puerto (1963) and O Negrinho do Pastoreio (1973). He took a non-speaking role in The Prisoner of Rio (1988), which centred on the life in exile of the train robber Ronnie Biggs.
At the time of his death, reportedly from a heart attack, in his home town of Porto Alegre, Mello was said to be in talks for a documentary about the search for Black Orpheus. He was, however, largely a forgotten figure and his death was initially reported only in the Brazilian language media. He was twice married and had five children.
Breno Mello, actor, born September 7 1931; died July 14 2008
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