Robert Hugues-Lambert(1908-1945)
- Actor
When Mermoz (1943) premiered in Paris on
3rd November 1943, no-one seemed to notice the conspicuous absence of
its star, Robert Hugues-Lambert. Lambert had a good reason for not
being there: He was in a concentration camp. Just a few weeks before
the end of the shooting, Lambert had been arrested by the Gestapo in a
gay bar and sent to Drancy concentration camp, just outside Paris.
Without its main actor, the production was forced to close down.
André Tranché, the producer, now facing
bankruptcy, tried to have Lambert released but in vain. After several
agonising (and costly) weeks, a replacement was found in the person of
the newcomer Henri Vidal. All the remaining
scenes were subsequently shot with Vidal (who looked uncannily like
Lambert). But another problem soon arose: Vidal's voice didn't match
Lambert's. The production shut down once again. But André Tranché
managed to get in touch with Robert Hugues-Lambert in Drancy and begged
him to record the dialogue from behind the camp's barbed-wired fence.
Lambert accepted and a sound engineer, a boom and a microphone were
secretly dispatched to Drancy where all the dialogues were recorded
with the complicity of the camp's warden. The film was finally
completed on schedule and released in November 1943. 'Mermoz' was his
only film. Despite several other attempts to have him freed or
transferred to another prison, Robert Hugues-Lambert was deported to
Germany. He died in the German concentration camp of Gross Rosen (now
Rogoznica, Poland) in March 1945.