Variety described her as ‘exceedingly appealing’ in George Cukor’s film
Taina Elg, who has died aged 95, was a Finnish dancer and actress who briefly attained Hollywood fame after being scouted by MGM in the early 1950s; she won a Golden Globe for her performance as Angèle Ducros, the French chorus girl entangled with impresario Gene Kelly in George Cukor’s enduring musical Les Girls (1957).
Pert, pretty and multilingual, Taina Elg graced three of that film’s Cole Porter-composed musical numbers: the title song, plus Ca c’est l’amour (in which she serenaded Kelly in a rowing boat) and Ladies in Waiting, where her leg-kicking in dense period costume belied the fact that she had given birth not long before shooting. Taina Elg credited Cukor as “the ideal director”; Variety’s critic called her “exceedingly appealing”.
Les Girls earned three Oscar nods, with Orry-Kelly winning Best Costume Design; at the Golden Globes, it did better yet, winning Best Picture – Comedy or Musical, with Taina Elg and Kay Kendall sharing the Best Actress gong.
It was to be the highpoint of her film career. Taina Elg left MGM two years later, and the movie musical fell into decline over the next decade.
Taina Elisabeth Elg was born in Helsinki on March 9 1930 to pianist Åke Elg (born Ludwig) and his Russian wife Elena Dobroumova, a music professor. Perhaps inevitably, the young Taina showed an aptitude for performance: as a child, she made an uncredited screen debut in the film Suominen’s Family (1941).
Like many, her progress was stalled by war. After the Soviets invaded Finland in 1939, the family fled first to Switzerland, then to Canada. Upon returning, Taina Elg studied at the Finnish National Ballet, where she eventually became a soloist, touring Europe and North America. She later joined Sadler’s Wells and the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, only for an injury to curtail her dancing career.
By then, Taina Elg had caught the eye of Edwin H Knopf, an American producer working for MGM’s London office. She delayed screen-testing to marry the economist (and fellow Finn) Carl-Gustav Björkenheim; yet she finally signed in 1953, making her MGM debut in the biblical drama The Prodigal (1955) alongside Lana Turner.
Her supporting turn as a ballerina in Gaby (1956) earned her a first Golden Globe for New Foreign Star of the Year – Female, but after Les Girls she struggled to find roles. The most prominent was that of the schoolteacher assisting Kenneth More’s Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps (1959); a more typical project was the Cinecittà-shot peplum film The Bacchantes (1960), very loosely based on Euripides.
Taina Elg took US citizenship in 1960 and thereafter found steady employment on the stage. She made her Broadway debut as Sister Albertine in the 1970 production of Joshua Logan’s Look to the Lilies, won a Tony nomination in the 1974 revival of Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley? and played the hero’s mother in the original 1982 production of Tommy Tune’s Nine.
Film and television provided slimmer, albeit diverse pickings: Hercules in New York (1970) alongside the emergent bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, a two-year shift on the soap One Life to Live as the tycoon’s wife Olympia Buchanan, and a guest spot on “A Fashionable Way to Die”, a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote set in the world of Parisian haute couture.
She cameoed in Mike Figgis’s murder-mystery Liebestraum (1991), Woody Allen’s made-for-television Don’t Drink the Water (1994) and the Barbra Streisand vehicle The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), before understudying in Broadway’s 1998 revival of Cabaret and appearing in the touring production of the musical Titanic (1998-99). She was awarded the Finnish Order of the Lion in 2004.
In her rare interviews, she looked back fondly on her MGM years: “People always ask me: ‘Huh, Taina, what about those Hollywood parties?’ And I can’t tell them any lurid stories, because I was never involved in them. I was under contract, I was married, I was very safe at MGM.”
After divorcing Björkenheim in 1960, Taina Elg married the Italian-American sociology scholar Rocco Corporale in 1982; he died in 2008. She is survived by a son, the jazz guitarist Raoul Björkenheim.
Taina Elg, born March 9 1930, died May 15 2025
