Jacques Sernas
Jacques Sernas ( Lithuanian: Jokūbas Šernas; born July 30, 1925 in Kaunas, Lithuania ) is a French film actor and screenwriter.
Life
Sernas belonged to a prominent Lithuanian family. So counting his father, the lawyer Jokūbas Šernas, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence of Lithuania in 1918. Sernas senior died in 1926, when Jacques was only one year old.
His Russian mother moved with the boy then to Paris, where he spent his childhood and youth and attended school. Sernas has therefore today the dual citizenship of Lithuania and France. As a young man, Sernas joined the Resistance to fight against the occupation of his homeland by the Nazis. However Sernas had no luck and was arrested by the Nazis. Then he was interned for over a year in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was forced to do hard labor.
After the war Sernas first began to study medicine, but this broke rapidly. In order to keep and his mother financially afloat, he made his way by doing odd jobs, including as a night watchman, waiter at the Café de la Paix, and ski instructor in Chamonix -Mont- Blanc. He also tried it briefly as a journalist - he was also a correspondent at the Nuremberg trials - was this career aspirations but also on.
In 1947, he stood in the Italian film drama Gioventù perduta first time on camera, laying the foundation for a more than 60 year career. Sernas, who was first seen in Italian and French films, reached from the mid-1950s and the reputation of Hollywood. In 1956, he stood in the historical film The beautiful Helen as Prince Paris in front of the camera. In his few American films he appeared under the pseudonym Jack Sernas.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Sernas settled in Rome, where he has since been seen in mostly Italian productions. In 1966 he wrote his script and so far only, Zarabanda Bing Bing, a parody of the James Bond film series, in which Sernas also played the lead role.
Little is known about the private life of Jacques Sernas. In June 1955, he married the Romanian journalist Maria Stella Signorini. The following year, he became the father of a daughter.