Jean Roy(1921-1956)
When Roy joined Paris-Match in 1949, his nose for news was indistinguishable from his lust for danger. As a World War II soldier, he parachuted into occupied France, landed in the Normandy invasion, was badly wounded at Bastogne (for which he won the Silver Star). As a civilian, he kept going to war. In Guatemala during the anti-Communist revolution, he climbed over street barricades carrying not only a camera but a .45 Colt. During Tunisian riots, he calmly snapped pictures in the middle of a pillaging mob looking for Frenchmen to kill. In Indo-China, snipers’ bullets ripped his uniform without touching him. In Algeria, he was often as much as five hours ahead of advancing French troops. In Moscow, he stepped up to a high-ranking Soviet officer in the street, plucked off his shoulder-boards and said "Thanks, I’ll keep these as souvenirs."
In his latest hunt for trouble in Egypt, Roy, the big (6 ft., 190 Ibs.), handsome Frenchman (real name: Yves Leleu) teamed up with an oddly contrasting companion: short, owlish Photographer David Seymour, 45, a gray-haired, Polish-born, Sorbonne-educated American known affectionately almost everywhere as "Shim" (after his real name, Chimin), and as celebrated for his gentleness and sensibility as Roy for his daring. Sim had replaced Robert Capa as president of the picture agency Magnum Photos Inc.
When a report reached Port Said that the Egyptians were sending a hospital train to the front to evacuate wounded, Shim and Roy hustled to shoot the scene. With Roy, who was living up to his legend as the fire-eating knight-errant of war journalism, at the wheel, they raced south toward the front line along a road flanked on one side by the Suez Canal, on the other by a fresh-water canal. The front was unmarked. British paratroopers, dug in along the side of the road, saw the jeep coming and tried to wave it down. It roared by. Some 1,000 yards down the road, it shot past an Egyptian outpost. Then the luck that had held so miraculously through wars, riots and revolutions was suddenly shattered in a burst of Egyptian machine-gun fire. The jeep swung crazily off the road with the riddled bodies of the two photographers, the first press casualties of the war that had halted with a cease-fire even before they were hit.
He left a young widow, Dominican Lucita Gracia, younger sister of the screen diva Maria Montez, and three young sons behind.
In his latest hunt for trouble in Egypt, Roy, the big (6 ft., 190 Ibs.), handsome Frenchman (real name: Yves Leleu) teamed up with an oddly contrasting companion: short, owlish Photographer David Seymour, 45, a gray-haired, Polish-born, Sorbonne-educated American known affectionately almost everywhere as "Shim" (after his real name, Chimin), and as celebrated for his gentleness and sensibility as Roy for his daring. Sim had replaced Robert Capa as president of the picture agency Magnum Photos Inc.
When a report reached Port Said that the Egyptians were sending a hospital train to the front to evacuate wounded, Shim and Roy hustled to shoot the scene. With Roy, who was living up to his legend as the fire-eating knight-errant of war journalism, at the wheel, they raced south toward the front line along a road flanked on one side by the Suez Canal, on the other by a fresh-water canal. The front was unmarked. British paratroopers, dug in along the side of the road, saw the jeep coming and tried to wave it down. It roared by. Some 1,000 yards down the road, it shot past an Egyptian outpost. Then the luck that had held so miraculously through wars, riots and revolutions was suddenly shattered in a burst of Egyptian machine-gun fire. The jeep swung crazily off the road with the riddled bodies of the two photographers, the first press casualties of the war that had halted with a cease-fire even before they were hit.
He left a young widow, Dominican Lucita Gracia, younger sister of the screen diva Maria Montez, and three young sons behind.
