Great Lives

The Red Baron shot down a total of 80 allied aircraft in a flying career that made his name immortal both in aerial combat and the history of aviation itself

John Huston and Jean-Paul Sartre came together to create a film based on the life of Sigmund Freud, but the project was scuppered by irreconcilable creative differences

The German-born artist created his melancholy and nightmarish Europe After the Rain II during the most frightening and uncertain period of his own life

The diminutive Italian actress, star of La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, was more than a match for her husband, director Federico Fellini, on and off set

She was that rarest of dancers, one who could apparently transcend physics and the limitations of the human body

The remarkable career of the Spanish republican soldier who stumbled into the film industry

After decades of success in the US and Europe, the Russian composer suffered an ignominious demise in 1950s Moscow

The Ukrainian-American was forward thinking in his willingness to combine art with the world of science and engineering

He was born into a farming family, but it was always the agricultural machinery rather than the land itself that fascinated the young Ferruccio

Some credited him for paving the way for the nouvelle vague, but the Frenchman seemed to be content being known for his wives

One scene, for which she was not prepared, defined the career of an actress who never wanted to be a star

Nothing in the life of Alexandra, Princess of Greece and Denmark, Queen of Yugoslavia, was ever truly her own

The Russian always insisted she could never envision a life without dancing

The French director's obsessive desire for perfection proved ultimately self-destructive

The riptide of 20th century politics had pulled him from his homeland and set him adrift. A tumultuous period that soon defined his work

In death as well as in life, the Rasputin story is shrouded in an awed mythology

His was acting of remarkable subtlety and nuance, especially when sharing the screen with some of cinema’s most magnetic women

The Dane had a reputation as a vamp but in truth was as fragile as a gazelle

The German spent a lifetime seeking a creative place as far as possible from the vivid horrors of his past

The Italian's conducting was so intense a friend swore he'd seen a white glow around him

Nobody stuck a poster of Niels Bohr, wild-haired and with his tongue out, on their wall, but the Dane did as much for expanding the range of scientific knowledge in the modern age as Albert Einstein

To this day, despite his ambitions and desires, the legendary actor is considered a key figure in French cinema

Named after its creator, the theremin became one of the sounds of the 20th century, from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Scooby Doo

For all Fellini is held up as the ultimate chronicler of Rome in the 20th century, it’s Rimini that made him and Rimini that inhabits his films

The one-time middleweight Greco-Roman wrestling champion of Europe was a a surprisingly nuanced screen presence

From the very beginning, Sylvia Kristel’s life thrummed with an undercurrent of impermanence

For all the remarkable events and achievements of his life, Brynner was always content for mythologies to propagate around him

He still dabbled in the art world, but the last four decades of the Frenchman’s life were focused almost entirely on the game

Even at the age of 87, Irving was pondering if he had achieved enough during his career

Popper never accepted the idea that people did not know about the Holocaust or the gulags, rather they chose not to know. For him, knowledge was a moral obligation

There was far more to Anna Maria Pierangeli than what cinema-goers saw on the screen and friends saw off it

He baffled and fascinated his critics, but the actor somehow became the absolute personification of insouciant cool