Ultra-, ultra-rare vintage blue fountain pen signature on a roughly 1.5 x 1.75-inch card, acquired by inveterate English theater figure and autograph hound A.R. Davis in the early 1960s, labeled with his usual violet fountain pen notation, and affixed with photo mounts to a 4x6-inch album page. Note that the image of the star shown here alongside the scan of the signed piece is not included. Gorgeous Françoise Dorléac was the elder, ill-fated sister of French film star Catherine Deneuve. A model for Christian Dior, she entered the film industry with the movie short Mensonges (1957) before being invited to study acting at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in 1959. The slim, gamine, pale-skinned brunette stunner would go on to star in films like François Truffaut's New Wave classic The Soft Skin (1964), the popular James Bond-eque spy spoof That Man from Rio (1964), Roman Polanski's black comedy Cul-de-sac (1966), Where the Spies Are (1966), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), which demonstrated her abilities at both drama and comedy. Tragically, in June of 1967, just as she was on the brink of international stardom, a rental car she was driving flipped and burst into flames on a roadway in Nice, France. She was only 25. This is just the third example of her autograph we have ever encountered.

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