Janique Joelle

Born Gillette Charles in Britanny in 1918, she was developing a career as a singer in Paris when she married, in October 1939, an expat English engineer, Kenneth Rowe. The German invasion soon drove them to England, where Kenneth helped to run a munitions factory. Janique, using her new stage name, joined the Entertainment National Service Association, ENSA, playing in shows for British troops at home and overseas. Her agent sent her to audition for Hitchcock, when he needed urgently to cast the key role of a young French resistance worker in Bon Voyage. He had by then rejected a variety of other candidates; one look at Janique was decisive. She filled the role perfectly, right down to her harrowing death scene as a Gestapo victim. Bon Voyage was shown successfully throughout liberated France, but its topical propaganda function meant that it was soon forgotten. Hitchcock had forecast a long film career for Janique, but there was no follow-up. Instead, she appeared in variety shows on BBC television and on stage, and set up her own talent agency.

Janique Joelle had a long career as a theatrical performer and agent, but is best remembered for her starring role in Bon Voyage, the short French-language propaganda film made in England in 1944 by Alfred Hitchcock.

After divorce from Kenneth in 1949, she married the entrepreneur Bridges George McGibbon Lewis, better known as 'Bunny' Lewis. A war hero who won the MC as a Major in the Black Watch, he joined her in a partnership that was as happy professionally as it was personally, promoting media stars like Simon Dee, Katie Boyle, the pre-scandal Jimmy Savile, and the singer Craig Douglas.

After Bunny's death in 2001, Janique lived on in their London home, and was thrilled by the rediscovery of her work on Bon Voyage, now available in a DVD edition.

Her vivid memories of the production are recorded in a long interview in the 2015 book on Hitchcock's 'Forgotten Films'.