Mel Ferrer, actor-director, husband of Audrey Hepburn, dies

Ferrer died Monday at his ranch near Santa Barbara, family spokesman Mike Mena said.

Ferrer's most impressive film role came in 1953 in "Lili." He played a rippled carnival puppeteer with whom a French orphan (played by Leslie Caron) falls in love. He also won critical acclaim as Luis Bello in Robert Rossen's 1951 depiction of the public and private life of a bullfighter in "The Brave Bulls," based on a Tom Lea book, and starred opposite Hepburn in 1956's "War and Peace."

He and Hepburn had become engaged in 1954 when they appeared together in the New York play "Ondine." They married later that year in Burgenstock, Switzerland. The pair divorced in 1968 and Ferrer married his fourth wife, Elizabeth Soukhotine, in 1971. She survives him.

Ferrer and Hepburn costarred in a television version of "Mayerling," and Ferrer directed Hepburn in the 1959 film "Green Mansions."

He also produced one of Hepburn's greatest film triumphs, 1967's "Wait Until Dark," a terrifying thriller in which she portrays a blind woman terrorized by drug dealers who break into her home.

Born Melchor Gaston Ferrer on Aug. 25, 1917, in Elberon, N.J., Ferrer was the son of a doctor from Puerto Rico and a socialite mother. He grew up in comfortable surroundings, attending private schools and Princeton University. After winning a playwright's award in his sophomore year, Ferrer left Princeton to write a novel in Mexico. Instead he wrote a children's book, "Tito's Hats," which was published by Doubleday.He spent a year as a book editor in New York, then began his acting career as a dancer in Broadway musicals. He acted in plays and on radio and directed a Hollywood movie, "Girl of the Limberlost."

Back in New York, he starred in the play "Strange Fruit," about a lynching in the South, and directed Jose Ferrer (no relation) in "Cyrano de Bergerac." His first major film role was in 1949's "Lost Boundaries," playing a light-skinned African-American doctor who passed for white in a New Hampshire town.

In all, he appeared in more than 100 films and made-for-television movies, directed nine films and produced nine more.