Biography

He didn't get along with star Errol Flynn while directing him in his adventure movie, Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951). Near the end of the shooting, Flynn had grown so fed up with Marshall's tyrannical ways that he left the set for good and had to be replaced by a stunt double in the final scenes. The film was a critical and commercial disaster.

In 1961 he married Ginger Rogers. The marriage soured very quickly, not helped when the movie he produced for her to star in (The Confession (1964)) bombed. Though long separated, they did not obtain a divorce until 1969.

A fictionalized version of him (Jean Yanne's despicable Julius Mandenne) appears in daughter Tonie Marshall's Bastard Brood (1996). The film follows four different sons that Julius had with different women as they find out about his existence (when he's put on trial for murder) and try to connect with him. The character is nicknamed "The American" and his half-American daughter Susan (played by Molly Ringwald) works as a cinematic counterpart to William and Michèle Morgan's son, Mike Marshall. Julius' daughter Sophie (Nathalie Baye) is a fictionalized version of Tonie, whose real-life mother Micheline Presle fittingly appears in the film as Sophie's mother (on the other hand, a photo of Gena Rowlands--and not Morgan--is used for Susan's mother).

He came from a very conservative family background. When first wife Michèle Morgan moved to Hollywood and had her house built at 10050 Cielo Drive, he refused to move in with her (because, in his family's views, it was dishonorable for a man to live at his woman's place), so he demanded that she sell the property. The house was eventually bought by director Roman Polanski, and in 1969 it was the site of the infamous murders committed by the Charles Manson clan in which Polanski's wife Sharon Tate was one of the victims.

Convinced second wife Micheline Presle to follow him to Hollywood in the late 1940s, promising her that he would do everything possible to help her career. Against her better judgment, she broke a great contract she had in France with producer Paul Graetz (which had always given her carte blanche when it came to choosing her advisers and collaborators) to sign an unfruitful, six-year contract with 20th Century-Fox that, eventually, didn't allow her any say on her Hollywood projects. She later related that she did not like any of the roles she played in American films.