Hollywood (Jan - Mar 1943)

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I The location site on which For Whom the Bell Tolls company is settled is one of the toughest Hollywood has ever attempted. The members of the cast have to skim the jagged cliffs of the Sierra Nevada like mountain goats. The sun beats down hard and unrelenting, accommodations are rough and makeshift. Cook, waiter and dishwasher walk out regularly leaving a hungry and irritable crowd to shift for themselves. But to Katina Paxinou who plays Pilar this is pouf — nothing. There is scarcely a hardship or a horror that she hasn't undergone in the past three years so that nothing can upset her aplomb now. Katina Paxinou is Greece's foremost actress. She arrived in this country after a passage filled with so much terror that her survival is a miracle. In her first film, one that tells of the fighting people of Spain, she will bring an intimate understanding of the horror and the heroism that is war. As the first lady of the Royal Theater of Greece, she could have been useful to the Nazis in influencing public opinion. Just before the Nazi invasion, a high German official came to her with a lucrative offer to do a play in Germany. With it was a promise to protect her family in Greece, too — a tempting offer indeed. She refused. "I have a commitment in England," she said coolly. "In three more days England will be nothing but an unimportant little island," the Nazi minister warned her. "Nevertheless, I still choose the 'unimportant little island!' " she answered defiantly. She went to England to perform in Ibsen's Ghosts. Shortly after, France fell and she was stranded in England, cut off from the usual passage home. It was urgent that she get back— her husband and daughter were there — but to do so involved travelling through the United States and returning via the back door. No ships were leaving England, but by desperate effort she was able to get on a merchant ship by signing up as a member of the crew. She was the only woman on board, and after a few days out they were torpedoed by a German submarine. She spent eighteen unforgettable hours in an open lifeboat before she was rescued by a British destroyer. "It was February. We were in the Northern Atlantic and the ocean spray turned to ice on us," she recalls darkly. "Those eighteen hours were like eighteen years." After a hell like that, it would have been understandable if she had fallen to pieces after the rescue. Instead she sprang back to life on the destroyer, made tea for the crew and sang for the men. They adored her. "The gunner on the boat was a baritone. We sang duets between alarms," she explains. When she was returned to England, America was out of the question for she arrived in time for the worst bombing of the war. She lived through ten months of continuous Nazi aerial bombardment of London. "Day after day, night after night, it was the same," she says. "But people were brave and tried to live their normal lives when the world seemed falling apart." Eventually, she was able to get passage to Lisbon. The night she was to leave, her hotel was bombed, and she lost everything she had with her, clothes, jewelry, money. "I was stranded in my nightgown," she laughs. "I borrowed a dress from a friend and was off for Lisbon." After an interminable wait in Lisbon, she finally clippered to America. In New York she made many appearances for Greek war relief. When Paramount learned that she was in the country they promptly asked her to test for the role of Pilar. Up until then endless tests had been made for the part of the heroic guerrilla woman in Hemingway's novel of war-torn Spain; Nazimova, Ethel Barrymore, even Pola Negri came out of nowhere to try out. One look at Katina and the colorful Pilar was found. Recently, her husband, Alexander Minotis, with whom she had starred in the theater, arrived here after escaping from the Nazi Gestapo in his native land. They Katina Paxinou endured every hardship before she arrived in America from her native Greece. Actually a beautiful woman, she is shown at left as Pilar, the guerrilla woman in Paramount's For Whom the Bell Tolls Gallant Lady lv DRAKE HUNT were reunited after a two-year separation. Their meeting brought to a climax two daring odysseys of the war. Katina Paxinou is a woman who can adapt herself to any situation. As the daughter of one of the wealthiest grain brokers in Greece, she was used to luxury all her life. Later, as a brilliant stage figure, she had one of the largest collections of gowns, furs and jewels in all of Europe. But when her boat was torpedoed, sending her nineteen trunks to the bottom of the Atlantic, she arrived in New York with only the outfit she wore and not a dollar in her purse. But it didn't bother her at all. In fact, she gave the hat off her head to another woman on board because it looked well on her. She has always had servants, but when the chef walked out on location she laughed, "Why you worry? I can cook." And she did— a native dish known as "dolmas" made of stuffed grape leaves, meat balls and lemon-cream sauce. "Gary Cooper likes my cooking," she says shining. "He says he hass nefer indigestion when he eats it." Impulsive always, Katina is a free 42