Actress, Author. She followed a brief career as a silver screen sex kitten with success as a writer of children’s stories. Born Anne-Jose Madeleine Henriette Benard, she initially performed as a dancer and became an overnight star as the title lead of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1949 “Manon” which won the Lion d’or at the Venice Film Festival. Signed by Fox she soon found herself on the cover of “Life” and in the pages of numerous European movie magazines while starring in “The Black Rose” (1950), her only Hollywood film, with Orson Welles and Tyrone Power, and in the 1952 “Bluebeard” in which audiences got to see her in a curtained-but-provocative striptease. Cecile’s performing years were shortened by a secret marriage to Si Braham El Glaoui, son of the Pasha of Marrekesh, but after the six year union broke-up she found a second calling as a children’s author. Becoming a screenwriter for French television she also produced “Belle et Sebastien”, a series of novels about an orphan boy and his dog surviving in the French Alps which were turned into a successful series that ran for several years, was dubbed into English, Japanese, and Italian, and even gave the name to a Scottish pop band. Cecile was to produce a second series, “Poly”, centering on a boy and his horse, in both of her programs casting her son Mehdi in the lead. She died after an extended battle with lung cancer. (bio by: Bob Hufford)