Mila Parély

Who was Mila Parély?

Mila Parély was a French actress of Polish ancestry best known for the roles of Belle's sister in Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête and as Geneviève in La Règle du jeu. She gave up acting in the late 1950s in order to take care of her race-car driving husband Taso Mathieson, who had been injured in an accident. She was married to the actor Jean Marais from 1942 to 1944, when they divorced. Marais was the long-term lover of Jean Cocteau and her co-star in the latter's 1946 film version of Beauty And The Beast.

She also worked with such notable directors as Max Ophüls, Robert Bresson, Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst. She returned to acting briefly in the late 1980s. Mila Parély died on 14 January 2012, aged 94, in Vichy, where she had spent the last fifty years of her life.