Trivia

Was fluent in Italian, which is quite evident in the film L'assedio dell'Alcazar (1940) (she was not dubbed).

Her father was from Monaco and her mother was Italian.

Companion during WWII of German officer Aloïs Deissböck which caused her many problems at the Libération.

Balin posed for some advertisements in Paris before she began acting in films.

Considered one of the finest actresses of French cinema in the 1930s, she was discredited by her fraternization with the Nazis.

She was a policewoman in Paris until friends urged her to take a screen test.

Balin arrived in Hollywood in 1937 with a staff of servants and with 28 trunks containing "most of her worldly possessions.

During the final 10 years of her life she lived in a "charitable home".

In complete destitution, physically marked by illness ( meningitis , cirrhosis ), she returned to Paris in 1957. Taken in by the association responsible for helping former artists in need, La roue tourne , founded by Paul Azaïs and his partner Janalla Jarnach, she died at the age of 59 on November 9, 1968, at 5:30 in the morning, at the Beaujon hospital in Clichy 1, in anonymity and poverty.

During Nazi occupation of France, she became romantically involved with an officer of the Wehrmacht and at the end of war she was imprisoned in Fresnes until January 1945.