Not many have entered the movie arena as auspiciously as our October Star of the Month Leslie Caron, who was given the chance to star and dance in her first motion picture with the heavily lauded and light-footed Gene Kelly. She more than held her own, captivated critics and moviegoers in general, then saw that film go on to win the Oscar® as the best of its year. (I speak of 1951's An American in Paris, which will be showing on our first night this month of Caron movies, Oct. 5).

But what makes the Caron career particularly interesting and refreshing is the way she's parlayed that spectacular Hollywood entrance into the enduring, multilayered international career which has followed: Oscar®-nominated performances in 1953's Lili and 1962's The L-Shaped Room, the title role in another Academy Award®-winning Best Picture, 1958's Gigi, Golden Globe®-nominated work as Best Actress for 1961's Fanny, roles opposite the likes of Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Orson Welles, Rock Hudson, Dirk Bogarde, Charles Boyer and a multitude of others through the years, on to an Emmy® award two years ago for a harrowing 2007 performance on TV's Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. (The lady also runs a first-rate countryside hotel and restaurant just outside of her Paris home base.)

This month we'll be offering you the chance to see or re-see Leslie Caron in her two Oscar®-nominated movie performances as well as those many musical treats for which she's so well remembered (Gigi, Lili and The Glass Slipper also air on Oct. 5). We'll be serving up several other Caron films as well, some less famous, others which you may not know at all, but each of which show her range, skills and amazing growth through the years as an actress. Among the rarely seen treats is the TCM premiere of an offbeat spoof about Hollywood Leslie made in 1959 with Henry Fonda called The Man Who Understood Women (airing Oct. 12), based on a book by Romain Gary. Another rarity is Ken Russell's Valentino (Oct. 26), made in 1977, not about fashion guru Valentino Garavani but silent movie heartthrob Rudolf Valentino, with Leslie playing legendary screen star/diva Alla Nazimova to Rudolf Nureyev as the actor.

We'll also be kicking off our month-long Caron cavalcade with a Private Screenings interview she and I did in 1999, which rates as one of my own particular favorites, in which she reveals aspects of her life I hadn't had a clue about before: her growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris, the cultural shock of going from Paris under siege to the opulent, fairytale (but, to her, often nightmarish) world of Hollywood in the 1950s, and so much more. Another revelation: that big launch in An American in Paris had not been her first chance at a film career. At age 18 she had declined the female lead opposite Tyrone Power in 20th Century- Fox's 1950 epic The Black Rose. There's much to learn about this exceptional lady and we hope you'll join us every Monday all month long to discover more and enjoy a treasure chest of diverse films with one of the film world's rarest but too often underrated jewels.

by Robert Osborne