With classic patrician features and an independent, non-conformist personality, Capucine began her film debut in 1949 at the age of 16 with an appearance in the film Rendezvous in July. She attended school in France and received a BA degree in foreign languages. Married for seven months in her late teens, she never remarried. In 1957, she was discovered by director Charles K. Feldman while working as a high fashion model for Givenchy in Paris, and brought to Hollywood to study acting under Gregory Ratoff. She was put under contract by Columbia studios in 1958, and had her first leading part in the movie, Song Without End. She made 6 more major movies in the early to middle 1960s, two of which (The Lion and The 7th Dawn) starred William Holden, with whom she had a two year affair. Moving from Hollywood to a penthouse apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1962, she continued making movies, mostly in Europe, until her suicide in 1990.
According to rumor, Capucine was remembered in the wills of actors William Holden (to the tune of $50,000) and Peter Sellers, as well as that of Fox kingpin Darryl F. Zanuck. Capucine was a longtime friend of Audrey Hepburn, the two having met while modelling in Paris in the late forties. A manic depressive, Capucine's life had on several occasions been saved by her friend (both women lived at the time in Switzerland) after repeated suicide attempts. When she committed suicide in March 1990 at the age of fifty-nine, her obituary in the New York Times stated that her only known survivors were her three cats. Died in Lausanne, Switzerland after jumping from her eighth-story apartment window. Capucine, her name adopted during her modeling career, is French for the flower nasturtium, and is pronounced Cap-ooh-seen. Nickname to close friends was "Cap". Had a relationship with the actor, William Holden Capucine was a witness to the 1969 wedding of longtime friend Audrey Hepburn to Dr.Andrea Dotti in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she lived for many years until her death. Capucine was considered one of the great beauties of Europe. A former model, Capucine, born in Saumur, France, hails from the same small town on the Loire as one of her famous patrons, Coco Chanel. At 18, Capucine met her spouse on the set of the 1949 film, Rendezvous in July (her first screen appearance), and married him the following year. The marriage lasted six months.