Marpessa Dawn 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.
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… read more
Marpessa Dawn 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.
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. —Guardian
