Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit — Biography

French actress and singer Pascale Petit appeared in more than fifty films between the late 1950s and the early 2000s and, in the 1960s, took female leads in multinational European co-productions. Her birth name is Anne-Marie Petit, and one of her best-known roles is Cleopatra in A Queen for Caesar.

She came to cinema while working as a hairdresser: the actress Françoise Lugagne noticed her beauty, and Lugagne's husband Raymond Rouleau was looking for young actresses for his directorial debut The Crucible (1957), in which Petit played Mary Warren. The following year she won the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti for her role as Rosalie in One Life. Early on she appeared in films such as The Cheaters, Three Murderesses, Julie the Redhead, Une fille pour l'été, It Happened All Night and Towards Ecstasy. In 1962 she played Cleopatra in A Queen for Caesar, and in the European co-productions of the 1960s she appeared opposite Roger Moore, Ray Danton, Jeffrey Hunter, Guy Madison and Curd Jürgens.

In the late 1960s she took roles in Sexy Susan Sins Again (Duchess Elisa), Find a Place to Die (Lisa Martin) and The War Devils (Jeanine Raush); later she played Giletta in Boccaccio and Maureen in Küçük Kovboy. In the 1970s and 1980s she took various roles on French television; Peacetime in Paris (1981), Sans défense (1989) and Ville à vendre (1992) are among her later productions.