French nobleman, translator, film director, film producer, sometime actor, and war hero who was best known for his high-profile marriages to two leading Hollywood actresses.
His first wife was Gloria Swanson (1899–1983). They married in Paris, France, on 28 January 1925, after meeting on the set of the Swanson film Madame Sans-Gêne, on which La Falaise was working as a translator. They were officially divorced on 9 November 1931, at which time Swanson was several months pregnant by Michael Farmer, an Irish sportsman, who would become her fourth husband. (Thinking her divorce from La Falaise was already finalized, the actress had married Farmer in August, which was technically bigamy, and was forced to remarry him, legally, in November.) Swanson conceived a child with La Falaise but had an abortion because, as The New York Times noted, in 2004, “if she had given birth seven months after her marriage, her career would have been ruined”. During their marriage La Falaise was employed as the California representative of Peugeot American Corp., the U.S. branch of the European automobile manufacturer.
His second wife was Constance Bennett (1904–1965), whom he married in November 1931, days after his divorce from Swanson was finalized. With her, he founded Bennett Productions, a film company for which he directed Legong: Dance of the Virgin (the first colour movie filmed in Bali and the last of Hollywood’s silent films) and Kliou the Killer (filmed in present-day Vietnam and the last movie made in two-tone Technicolor). Bennett and La Falaise divorced in 1940.
His third wife, Emma “Emmita” Rodriguez Restrepo de Roeder, was a Colombian socialite, whose father had been a diplomat.
He did not have children. He died on 10 April 1972, aged 74, in Palma, Majorca, Spain.
Link to Wikipedia biography