(Photo caption 1)

With his wife, Romanian journalist Maria Stella Signorini, during their American stay, between 1955 and 1957

(Photo caption 2)

Relaxing on the shore of the Adriatic, with Italian comedienne Luciana Vedovelli, in 1952

A Lithuanian-born Frenchman who has chosen Italy as his cinematic home, Jacques Sernas has so well adapted himself to his Roman environment that when George Marchal arrived there in the 50s, Italians started calling him "the French Jacques Sernas". A cosmopolitan comedian, in the sense that beauty knows no frontiers, he was born to be on a film plateau and to entertain crowds. After the war, his Germanic charm, tinged with Slavic highlights, and his athletic build easily overwhelmed his scholastic aspirations. Before even knowing what was happening, he was dressed in a peplum, thrown in the arms of Anna Maria Ferrero and Carla Del Poggio and loaned to the Saint Maurice studios of Warner Brothers. Faithful to his adoptive country, however, he came back to live "the remainder of his age", as the poet would say. He is so perfectly assimilated to the artistic life of the peninsula, where he still does stage and TV work, that his name, in other countries, only survives in people’s memories.

Jacques Sernas was born on July 30, 1925, in Kaunas (Lithuania) to a Baltic father and a Russian mother. He left the shores of the Baltic sea at age one, for France, where his mother, after the death of her husband, who was his country’s minister of Justice, remarried a Parisian doctor. This is how Jacques Sernas became a French citizen and adapted so well to his new milieu that his Italian assimilation, twenty years later, caused no problem. This easy-going nature has always been an advantage since, already at age 15, he could master several languages, including Russian, German, English and, eventually, Italian.

He is still 15 when the war starts. He abandons high school and enters the Resistance movement as a courier but is arrested by the occupant and imprisoned in the camp of Büchenwald, where he wastes away until the German defeat. Back in civilian life, he prepares to study medicine at the University of Paris, while insuring, through a variety of jobs, the survival of his mother and his own. This is how he becomes a night watchman, a server at the Café de la Paix, a ski instructor at Chamonix, and even a special correspondent for the daily "Combat" at the Nuremberg trial. A sportsman and an athlete, he also tries his hand at boxing. And it is in a training room that he will make his first on-screen appearance, as an extra in "Miroir", starring Jean Gabin.

Finding this first experience underwhelming, he pursues his medicine studies while accepting other small roles, because the work is easy and pays well. Meanwhile, his photos make the rounds of talent agents and from the studios of the French Lux company, where he appears in "La Révoltée" ("Stolen Affections"), they find their way to the Italian Lux company which is casting its production of "Gioventù perduta" ("Lost Youth"). He makes a favourable impression. So favourable, in fact, that he signs a contract in letter form. Jacques Sernas arrives in Italy during the last months of 1947. He will stay there permanently, with only a few occasional returns to France for a film shoot.

1955 was a doubly important year for that young pin-up boy. On June 4, he marries Romanian journalist Maria Stella Signorini, with whom he will father a daughter, Francesca (1956) before resettling a few weeks later in Hollywood after establishing contacts during the shooting of "Helen of Troy" and "Jump Into Hell". But this American episode will be brief. It will represent only two years of curiosity and a change of scenery for this citizen of the world. In 1957, he comes back to Rome for good and reclaims his interrupted Italian career.

His film career was naturally affected by the end of the peplum period in the mid-60s. But this protean athlete did not wait to be in his forties to diversify his activities and to express on stage what films only offered very occasionally. Jacques Sernas did not renounce a film career, however. It’s just that his films rarely cross the Alps. It is easier to run into him nowadays in the gardens of the Villa Borghese or in a play by Pirandello produced for a Roman theatre company.