Then pastry chef and fellow poet Ragueneau ( Lloyd Corrigan) approaches him for help. When he receives a request from Roxane to see her in the morning, he is finally emboldened to act. He confesses that he is in love with her, but harbors no hope of it being returned because of his nose. When Le Bret presses him to reveal the real reason he hates Montfleury, Cyrano admits that he became jealous when he saw the actor smiling at his beautiful cousin Roxane ( Mala Powers). With the last line, he stabs his opponent.Ĭyrano's friend Le Bret ( Morris Carnovsky), Captain of the Gascony guards, warns him he has made powerful enemies of his victim's friends, but he is unconcerned. He then composes a ballade for the occasion on the spot and recites it during the sword fight. Cyrano first mocks his lack of wit, improvising numerous inventive ways in which Valvert could have phrased it (much to the amusement of the audience). An annoyed aristocratic fop, the Vicomte de Valvert ( Albert Cavens), provokes him into a duel by tritely insulting Cyrano's enormous nose. In seventeenth-century Paris, poet and supreme swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac ( José Ferrer) stops a play from being shown because he ostensibly cannot stand the bombastic style of the principal actor, Montfleury ( Arthur Blake). The film lapsed into the public domain in the mid-1980s. Mala Powers played Roxane, and William Prince portrayed Christian de Neuvillette. José Ferrer received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring performance as Cyrano de Bergerac. The 1950 film was produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Michael Gordon. The film was the first motion picture version in English of Rostand's play, though there were several earlier adaptations in different languages. It uses poet Brian Hooker's 1923 English blank verse translation as the basis for its screenplay. Cyrano de Bergerac is a 1950 American adventure film based on the 1897 French Alexandrin verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.