The French actress was discovered in 1932 while she was a model in Paris after she had left a bourgeois background in the south of France.
During the 1930s, her beauty brings the attention of directors who offer her roles of 'femmes fatales' and romantic seductive heroines. During World War II, Mireille Balin continues to play in a few films and falls in love with a German soldier. At the French Liberation, she is violently arrested and imprisoned until January 1945. From then, her career and personal life are ruined and she has to face many health problems. She tragically dies, in Paris, poor and anonymous.