TAINA ELG

(9 March 1930 - 15 May 2025)

The Finnish-American actress and dancer Taina Elg, who has died at the age of 95, was discovered by Hollywood in the 1950s when the film industry was trying to encourage foreign artists to make films in the US. This practice generally extended to very attractive actresses who could add an extra touch of glamour. In the mid-1950s Taina Elg was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM and in ’57 she won the Golden Globe for the Foreign Newcomer Award. She won another Golden Globe a year later for George Cukor’s Les Girls with Gene Kelly, an award that both she and Kay Kendall received for best motion picture actress in a musical or comedy. Elg was also nominated for a Golden Laurel as best new female personality. After that, her career progressed quite well.

Taina Elg was born in Helsinki to Ake Eig, a Finnish pianist, and Helen Doroumova, who was of Russian origin. Taina’s first film was the Biblical epic The Prodigal, with Lana Turner and Edmund Purdom. Then she was with Lana Turner again in Diane, on the life of Diane de Poitiers with a screenplay by Christopher Isherwood and music by Miklos Rozsa. In 1956 Gaby was a remake of Waterloo Bridge, about a ballet dancer who meets a soldier. Another imported talent was the leading actress – Leslie Caron - with John Kerr as the soldier. Then came Cole Porter’s Les Girls in which Elg really made her mark. In 1959 she came to London to appear in Ralph Thomas’s remake of Hitchcock’s 1935 thriller The 39 Steps with Kenneth More, about a man on the run for a crime he did not commit. There was the usual human interest in a story in which More, as Richard Hannay, has to be manacled to his leading lady Taina Elg – overnight!

Watusi (1959) was a sequel to King Solomon’s Mines with George Montgomery and David Farrar, but after that the films seemed to dry up. There was the Italian fantasy The Bacchantes (loosely based on the Euripides’ The Bacchae) and Hercules in New York with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1970. Skip two decades for Liebestraum, Mike Figgis’s American mystery with Kevin Anderson, Bill Pullman and, in her final role, Kim Novak. Elg was billed as Old Mother Ralston. Five years on and she made her final film, the Barbra Streisand-directed The Mirror Has Two Faces, a romantic comedy-drama with Streisand, Jeff Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, Lauren Bacall and George Segal. Taina Elg played a professor.

Although she made a pleasing presence in films, Elg also appeared on stage, mainly in musicals. She was in the first production of Nine, Maury Yeston’s show about a film director not unlike Fellini. Then there was Where’s Charley?, Frank Loesser’s version of Charley’s Aunt. Elg also played Desiree Armfeldt in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in Australia. Her final stage performance was in Cheri, an off-Broadway production based on the 1921 novel by Colette.

With her first husband Carl-Gustav Bjorkenheim she had a son, Raoul. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1960. In 1985 she married Rocco Caporale who died in 2008. Taina Elg may not be remembered for a great deal of work, but what she did appear in made her a memorable part of Hollywood and theatrical history, albeit a minor player in both fields.

MICHAEL DARVELL