The first two screen appearances of Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier (1904-83) were in They Had to See Paris and Hot for Paris (both 1929). Her characters also epitomized Parisian gaiety and ‘ooh-la-la’. But she was actually a French-Canadian who never went to France, or anywhere else outside North America, in her life.
D’Orsay moved to New York as a young woman and found work in a revue by claiming to have experience at the Folies Bergère.She later took her surname from a brand of perfume. She worked in vaudeville until moving to Hollywood and achieving short-lived stardom until she foolishly walked out on a contract with Fox in 1936 and found it difficult to obtain work.
She then returned to vaudeville, taking film roles when she could get them, and worked right through to the early seventies. In 1971, D’Orsay played Solange, an aging French chorus girl in the original Broadway production of Follies.
One of D’Orsay’s best roles was as the awful Lili in MGM’s Going Hollywood. She made one other musical for the studio, playing Marcelle in the French-language version of The Merry Widow.
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