Suzanne Cloutier

French-Canadian blonde actress of the 1950s with flawless, chiseled features and a cool, wide-eyed beauty who, after a brief career as a New York model, was signed by George Stevens' Liberty Films, making her film debut in a small role in the 1946 "women's picture" "Temptation." Cloutier began her stage career the following year joining Charles Laughton's stage company for a season in New York and the Jean Daste Comedie Francise Touring Company in Paris. After starring in Julien Duvivier's French film, "Au Royanume des cieux/Woman Hunt" (1949), Cloutier was chosen by Orson Welles as the eleventh and final actress he hired to play Desdemona in his film version of "Othello" (completed 1952; US release 1955); her performance is finely honed, simple and straight forward, suggesting the beauty and poignant sweetness of the Moor's innocent bride. Cloutier continued her association with Welles, co-starring with him on the Paris stage in his "The Unthinking Lobster" and later helping to put together financing for his film projects "The Other Side of the Wind" (1972) and the never-completed "Don Quixote."