June Duprez

Who was June Duprez?

June Ada Rose Duprez was an English film actress.

The daughter of American vaudeville performer Fred Duprez and Australian Florence Isabelle Matthews, she was born in Teddington, Middlesex, England, during an air raid in the final months of the First World War.

She began acting in her teens with the Coventry repertory company after studying at the Froebel Institute, and was a film extra in 1935 before appearing in The Crimson Circle the following year. Her next film was The Cardinal, and she had a small role in The Spy in Black, but it was her fourth film, the epic London Films adaptation of A. E. W. Mason's The Four Feathers, that made her a film star, acting opposite John Clements, Ralph Richardson, and C. Aubrey Smith. Her peak of success came with the landmark fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad, which she also made for Alexander Korda's London Films. At this time she separated from her first husband Frederick Beauchamp, a wealthy Harley Street doctor whose jealousy of her film stardom had eroded their marriage.

Korda took charge of her career after this point and brought her to Hollywood where he set her asking price at $50,000 per film.