Drue Leyton: Movies & Filmography

Drue Leyton (born Dorothy Elizabeth Blackman) was an American actress and member of the French Resistance whose remarkable life spanned the worlds of Broadway theater, international broadcasting, and clandestine wartime heroism. Born on June 12, 1903, in either California or Somers, Wisconsin, Leyton spent part of her early years in Mexico, where her father worked as a mining engineer. She received an elite international education, attending the Bennett School for Girls in Millbrook, New York, a school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Sorbonne in Paris. After a failed marriage, she turned to acting and adopted the stage names Drue Leyton and Freya Leigh, beginning a career that would take her from the stages of New York to the heart of Nazi-occupied France.

Her Broadway career included notable performances in Red Harvest (1937), A Hero Is Born (1937), and We Are No Longer Children (1932), the last under the billing Freya Leigh. She also appeared in the original production of Green Grow the Lilacs and several Charlie Chan films, while also participating in a Works Progress Administration Theatre Project in New York in 1937. That same year, she moved to Paris with her future husband, the Franco-American actor Jacques Terrane (born Jacques Tartière), whom she married in 1938 in London. Terrane would later die in Syria in 1941 while fighting with the Free French forces. In Paris, Leyton worked for Radio Mondial, a shortwave station operated by France's Ministry of Information, producing programs designed to promote France to American audiences. She also broadcast for the Voice of America in 1938, and her sharp criticisms of the Nazi regime during these broadcasts earned her a promise of execution announced by Berlin radio. In September 1942, following the German occupation of northern and western France, Leyton was arrested by the Nazis—but only because she was an American woman, as her true identity remained unknown to the authorities. She managed to escape from her prison camp by feigning cancer, with the help of French doctors, and returned to her home in Barbizon in 1942. There, she joined the French Resistance, helping 42 downed Allied airmen escape to freedom and hiding others in her home until the war ended. During this dangerous period, she was known as Dorothy Tartière, using her married name. She was assisted at times by Sylvia Beach, the American-born owner of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. After the war, Leyton co-authored a book about this period with M. H. Werner titled The House Near Paris. She continued her public work as a lecturer and died on February 8, 1997, in Corona del Mar, California, leaving behind a legacy as both a talented actress and a brave heroine of the French Resistance.