Frequently cast as a world-weary continental, Marius Goring actually hails from the British Isle of Wight. The son of a physician, Goring was educated at Cambridge and in Europe, picking up an "ear" for foreign dialects along the way. An amateur actor since his teens, Goring made his professional stage debut in the early 1930s. His official film debut was in the lush-budgeted Rembrandt (1936), though in fact he first appeared on camera in the 1935 quota quickie Consider Your Verdict. Goring was at his flamboyant best in a brace of Powell-Pressburger productions of the 1940s: he played the Gallic "Operator 71" in the 1946 fantasy A Matter of Life and Death and was seen as the brilliant composer Julian Craster in The Red Shoes (1947). As the neurotic millionaire yachtsman Alberto Bravano in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Goring elicited boos from the gentlemen in the audience as he tried to purchase the affections of Ava Gardner. A more heroic Goring was seen in the 1954 television series The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel; he later starred on the British TV espionager The Expert, which ran sporadically from 1968 through 1974. Marius Goring was the husband of actress Lucie Mannheim, who died in 1975.
by Hal Erickson
biography
