Arielle Dombasle (born Arielle Laure Maxime Sonnery de Fromental on April 27, 1958 in Norwich, Connecticut) is a French-American singer, actress, director and model. Her breakthrough roles were in Éric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach (1983) and Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Blue Villa (1995). She became known to American audiences through her appearances on Miami Vice and the 1984 miniseries Lace.

Arielle and her brother, Gilbert, were raised in Mexico by their maternal grandparents after their mother died in 1964. She is the granddaughter of the French ambassadors in Mexico and daughter of an industrialist father, who was also an accomplished archaeologist and serious collector of pre-Colombian art. Arielle Dombasle grew up surrounded by Aztec, Mayan, and Olmec icons and serenaded by the most prominent latin artists as Rufino, Tamayo, Octavio Paz, Julio Costazar, Carlos Fuentes or Tamara de Lempicka, a country whose strict Catholicism indelibly marked her forever. Her maternal grandmother was Man'Ha Dombasle (née Germaine Massenet, 1898-1999, a writer and poet who translated Rabindranath Tagore's works into French and was a longtime friend of the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who dedicated to her his 1972 novel The Halloween Tree.

Dombasle family's surname was created in 1912, when Dombasle's grandfather René Sonnery (1887—1925), an industrialist from Lyon, married Anne-Marie Berthon du Fromental. She took Dombasle as her professional surname in honor of her mother.

She was raised in Mexico and also at Château de Chaintré, the Sonnery family's estate near Saumur, Maine et Loire.

After fifteen years of classical dance training, and having followed a trilingual secondary education (French, English, and Spanish) at the Franco-Mexican high school, she left Mexico in 1976 at the age of eighteen to study music and vocal training in Paris (conservatoire de musique), she started performing in theater, dance, and cinema. (via Wikipedia)