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Noelle Gillmor
Noelle Gillmor neé Naomi Newman ( b. Oct 2, 1914 - d. Aug 20, 1973) was an American screenwriter and film dubber/subtitler whose career spanned close to four decades (1935-1973). She worked with some of the most critically acclaimed and influential European film directors of the mid-1900's including Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Vittorio De Sic a, Costa-Gavras, Alain Robbe-Grillet among other greats.

Gillmor felt the word dubbing - simple voice substitution - inadequately described the work that she engaged in. She coined her technique of dubbing "transonics". She described it as "the art of translating the sound (language, voices, effects) of a motion picture from one language to another."

Names
While most of Noelle Gillmor's life's work has been recorded under the name she used after 1940 - Noelle Gillmor (sometimes misspelled as Noelle Gilmore) - her earlier contributions were recorded under variations of her given name and various married surnames and pseudonyms: Mme. Dreyfus, Naomi Newman, Noémie Dreyfus, Noemi Martel, Noémie Martel Dreyfus, Newmi Dreyfus, Nina Martel-Dreyfus, Nina Martel, N. Martel-Dreyfus, and Mme. Jean-Paul Le Chanois.

1933-1940
During these years, Gillmor first began to work on films in Europe, mostly as a writer/researcher. All were films with political messaging, some associated with the French Communist Party. She and her then husband Jean-Paul Dreyfus, also contributed some time and effort in Paris to Ciné-Liberté, a French Popular Front magazine with a focus on political films. Noelle is credited for research and writing on various films (mentioned below in the filmography section) and thought to have worked undocumented on many more. Most notably, she is known to have been the person who brought Jean Renoir the idea for his 1938 film La Marseillaise about the early French Revolution and had the role as a writer of the film.

1959-1973
After remarrying and starting a family, Noelle's film career re-emerges in the late 1950's with the subtitling and dubbing of Hiroshima Mon Amour directed by Alain Renais. The film was highly acclaimed and projected Noelle into the French New Wav e as a talented dubber and subtitler and who could offer English speaking audiences accessibility to the French filmmaking movement and vice versa.

As the dubber and subtitler for Truffaut's 400 Blows (Fr. Les Quatre Cents Coups), Gillmor had titled the film in English to be Wild Oats which the first American film posters sported. The original title is part of the French expression "faire les quatre cents coups" which does not translate word for word into English. The origins of the expression comes from an incident in the 1600's when French King Louis XIII (Catholic) fired over 400 cannon shots into a predominantly Protestant town of Montauban yet they did not surrender. What the expression came to mean over time however, is closer to "raise hell" or to live a wild life. The distributor of the film, the Zenith International Film Corporation, refused Gillmor's title of Wild Oats and went with a shortened version of the literal translation; 400 Blows.

Personal Life
Noelle was born Naomi Newman in Sokoły, Poland; only child to Mayer (Chil Meyer) Newman (Nejman) and Anna Libby (Chana Liebe) Bursztyn. In 1921, the family immigrated to the United States and Naomi spent her school years being raised in Los Angeles, California. At thirteen years old, she became, at that time, the youngest student ever accepted to the University of Southern California where she concentrated on the study of languages; Latin, Greek, Italian, and French. She graduated at age 17.

Noelle Gillmor (aka Naomi Newman) was the niece of independent film distributor Joseph Burstyn, who is most noted for the case he brought to the US Supreme court in which he fought against film censorship; Joseph Burstyn, Inc vs. Wilson, more commonly known as The Miracle case.

In 1932 Noelle, then Naomi, went to Paris France to continue her studies at the Sorbonne University and by September of the same year had met and married film actor/director Jean-Paul Dreyfus (aka Jean-Paul LeChanoi s). They separated sometime before 1940 when she returned to the United States. In 1939, some time after she and JP Dreyfus stopped living together and their marriage fell apart, and while Europe was in wartime turmoil, Gillmor was arrested and through the help of the American Embassy in Paris, was safely expelled from France to the United States. She arrived back in the US in February 1940. Their marriage formally ended in time for her, on January 15th 1947, to marry Daniel S. Gillmor, a writer/editor who had been the publisher of a short-lived (1940-1941) left-leaning U.S. magazine called Friday. Their marriage produced three sons: Stephen J. Gillmor, Thomas H. Gillmor, and Daniel S. Gillmor, Jr. The couple resided in New York City and then in Woodstock, NY. After their marriage ended in divorce, Noelle continued to live in the Catskills area and is buried in the Woodstock Artists' Cemetery. She died on August 20, 1973, just days after she completed the English version of Costa-Gavras' State of Siege.