The Real Refugees Singing in Casablanca

Madeleine Lebeau was eighteen when she and her Jewish husband, the actor Marcel Dalio, fled Paris ahead of the Wehrmacht in June 1940. They reached Lisbon on transit visas signed by the Portuguese consul Aristides de Sousa Mendes, boarded a ship for Chile, and discovered mid-voyage that their Chilean visas were forgeries. They got off in Mexico, then talked their way into Canadian temporary passports, then finally into the United States. Lebeau learned English on the boat.

Two years later, she was on a Warner Bros. soundstage in Burbank, playing Yvonne, the French girl Rick has discarded. The scene she is best remembered for is the one where Victor Laszlo orders the band at Rick's Cafe to drown out a table of singing German officers with "La Marseillaise." The camera cuts to her face. The tears are not Stanislavski.

Director Michael Curtiz, born Mano Kertesz Kaminer in Budapest, had stocked the scene with people who knew what they were singing about. NPR's count, drawn from the cast list, finds that of the credited actors playing refugees in the cafe, almost all were themselves European emigres who had fled fascism. Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi Major Strasser, had run from the Nazis with his Jewish wife in 1933.

When Joy Page died in 2008, Lebeau became the last credited cast member of Casablanca. She lived in Spain with her second husband, the screenwriter Tullio Pinelli, and died in Estepona in May 2016, at ninety-two. The shot of her crying "Vive la France!" outlived everyone else in the frame.