In the pantheon of film culture, Arletty has her place as the heroine of two wartime classics by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert: Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and, especially, Les Enfants du paradis (1943-45), in which as Garance she achieves a rare combination of romantic beauty and humour. While her wit and accent locate her as unmistakably working-class and Parisian, her performance owed much to her early career in music hall and boulevard theatre. Her 1930s film career was mainly in comedy: in the popular classic Hôtel du Nord (1938), she and Louis Jouvet outclassed Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont, the romantic leads. Similarly, in Le Jour se lève (1939), a classic of Poetic Realism, she was more of a match for Jean Gabin than the bland Jacqueline Laurent. Despite her spirited defence that "my heart is French but my body is international," her career suffered badly because of her wartime liaison with a German officer, though she went on to make a few films, including Jacqueline Audry's Huis-clos (1954) and the underrated L'Air de Paris (1954, dir. Marcel Carné). She also acted on stage until blindness forced her to retire in the 1960s. If Arletty rarely got the top billing she deserved in her films, the impact of her performances, full of heart and wisecracks, ensured her place as one of the great populist stars of French cinema.