Nanette Bordeaux came into the world as Hélène Olivine Veilleux on April 3, 1911, in Quebec—cold mornings, sharp air, a life built on the soft crunch of snow and the low hum of French spoken like prayer. She grew up carrying that language in her throat like a family secret, the kind you take with you even when the geography changes. And it did. The Veilleux family packed itself up in the 1930s and headed for New York City, that great American cathedral of noise and promise.
In Manhattan she found theater auditions, long hallways with peeling paint, and the kind of hope that tastes metallic—like biting your lip too hard but insisting the blood means you’re alive. By 1938 she was in front of a Hal Roach Studios camera doing a screen test. She beat out fifty other women for the chance to step in front of the lights. Maybe it was the accent, maybe the eyes, maybe the way she looked like someone who wanted this badly, even if she’d never say it out loud.
She started as Francine Bordeaux. A good name, sleek and continental. The sort of name that floats. During the 1940s she drifted through small roles, bit parts, the kind of background work that blurs into the credits like spilled ink. But she kept showing up, kept trying, kept breathing quietly in the margins until Jules White—Columbia Pictures’ mad captain of slapstick—found her.
White loved chaos and pratfalls and The Three Stooges, but he also loved a good type. Nanette, with her genuine French accent and careful features, became his perfect “Fifi.” You know the type: curls, a coy smile, a lilt in the voice that turns every line into a flirtation. She played them in Hugs and Mugs, Pest Man Wins, A Missed Fortune, Loose Loot. Little bursts of French charm dropped like pastries into the roaring slapstick machine.
Sometimes she had to bury the accent under an American one, like in Slaphappy Sleuths and Income Tax Sappy. That’s Hollywood for you—love what makes you different, then ask you to hide it the moment it’s inconvenient. Nanette did it anyway. Work was work, and bills were bills, and the camera was a jealous god.
Her career wasn’t long. Fifteen years, give or take. Enough for a handful of films, enough for comedy fans to remember her as one of those bright little sparks who darted through the frame and made the chaos look charming. But she never got the big roles, the glamorous posters, the long-term contract. She was one of those actresses Hollywood uses like a garnish—something to pretty up the meal, never the meal itself.
She died young. Too young. Acute bronchopneumonia took her on September 20, 1956, at just forty-five. You think of her breathing—those soft French vowels wrapped in cold New York air, then in the heat of studio lamps—and then you think of the lungs that failed her. A cruel kind of symmetry.
Her final film, A Merry Mix Up, came out six months after she died, as if she’d left behind one last wave from the other side of the curtain. One more wink. One more Fifi shrug. One more reminder that she was here, even if Hollywood blinked and nearly forgot.
Nanette Bordeaux never became a household name. But in every Stooge short where she sashays through the door, in every punchline delivered with that lilting grace, in every moment she brought softness to a world of eye pokes and exploding furniture—you catch a glimpse of what she could’ve been if life had been kinder.
A French girl in America, dancing in and out of slapstick shadows, gone before she had the chance to take a full breath of the future she deserved.
