Cinema’s great love affair with French star
French New Wave actor Jeanne Moreau was born 90 years ago today.
Today in History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Today in History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
“THERE must be a God,” enthused playwright Tennessee Williams, “and a God who gets things right — because he made Jeanne Moreau, gave her to us, and allows her to move in eternity in the films she has made.”
Moreau was already a star of the French stage when she befriended Williams while playing Maggie in a Paris production of his Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1956.
It was the stage role that elevated her film career, when “all the young directors of the New Wave came to see me,” Moreau said as she recalled her meeting with young French director Louis Malle. He became her lover after visiting her backstage during her run as Maggie, to beg her to appear in his 1958 murder romance Lift To The Scaffold.
Moreau was born in Paris 90 years ago, on January 23, 1928, the first of two daughters of Montmartre hotel and restaurant owner Anatole Moreau and his British-born wife, Folies Bergère dancer Kathleen Buckley. Buckley was dancing in a Josephine Baker show when she met Moreau at his La Cloche d’Or bar, “where artists and writers used to go for supper”, Moreau said. “She got pregnant. She got married. She gave up dancing. And she regretted not being an artist”.
After their divorce, Buckley and younger daughter Michelle returned to England. Moreau had wanted to be a dancer like her mother, but fell in love with acting after seeing her first play Antigone when she was 15. While her mother was encouraging, her father slapped her when she told him she wanted to study acting. She kept drama lessons with Comedie-Francaise dean Denis d’Ines a secret from her father, and at 18 enrolled at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique.
In 1947 theatre director Jean Vilar recruited her for a theatre festival at Avignon; when her father saw her photograph in a magazine report, he threw her out.
At 20 she became the youngest-ever full-time member of the Comedie-Francaise, where her debut role was in Ivan Turgenev’s drama A Month in the Country, and also met actor-director-screenwriter Jean-Louis Richard. They married in 1948, the day before their son Jerome was born. Two hours after the birth, Moreau volunteered to return to work.
After 22 roles in four years with Comedie-Francaise, and her first film role in 1949, in Dernier amour, she joined Theatre National Populaire. She became a French theatre star playing dual roles of a man’s wife and mistress in L’Heure eblouissante (The Dazzling Hour, 1953), and won further acclaim as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion in 1956.
Malle had embarked on “a great love affair” with Moreau when he cast her in his second 1958 release, Les Amants, or The Lovers, the sultry story about a bored provincial wife who leaves her husband and child for her lover. A box-office hit in France, in the US a Cleveland theatre manager was convicted for public depiction of obscene material after screening the film with its lovemaking scenes.
After winning critical acclaim for Lift To The Scaffold, and international scandal with The Lovers, Moreau considered “everything started up for me in 1958”. But she says filming The Lovers also ended her affair with Malle, who “could no longer stand to see me as others then saw me, and as only he had seen me until then.” But they remained good friends, and Malle again directed Moreau in Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within, 1963) and Viva Maria! (1965), alongside Brigitte Bardot.
After winning the best actor prize at Cannes in 1960 for Seven Days … Seven Nights, Moreau achieved international stardom after Francois Truffaut cast her as Catherine in his 1962 period romance, Jules et Jim.
Her film releases included an Orson Welles adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, with Anthony Perkins in 1962, by the time she met English director Tony Richardson by chance in Paris, when he immediately asked her to star in his psychological drama Mademoiselle.
Then married to Vanessa Redgrave, during filming Richardson enthused to his wife that Moreau was “the greatest cinema actor in the world. There’s nothing she can’t do. She works on an astonishing level of intuition.”
Their marriage ended when Richardson eventually confessed he was in love with Moreau.
Moreau later married American William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. Although their marriage lasted only two years, Friedkin says Moreau’s legacy was introducing him to the work of French novelist Marcel Proust on their honeymoon.
Moreau wrote and directed Lumiere, which focused on four actors, in 1976. When it screened at the San Francisco Film Festival, Williams came backstage to enthusiastically congratulate Moreau on the release.
In a career that included more than 120 films, Moreau played her last role in Le talent de mes Amis in 2015. She died in Paris last year.
Originally published as Cinema’s great love affair with French star
Gallipoli to D-Day: Aussie’s epic war story
George Dixon went ashore with the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, aged just 15 – and was shot. Three decades later he was fighting again, at history’s other most famous wartime landing.
Love story behind escape tragedy
An Australian murdered in the infamous wartime Great Escape died after swapping places with another man. And his story is still unfolding, 80 years on.