Jeanne Moreau, spellbinding movie star, dies at 89
There was the dry, husky voice that hinted at
a million smoked Gauloises. There were the dark eyes, carnal and enigmatic.
There was the brooding, slightly downward curve of her lips, a sultry pout that
could flash capriciously into a beguiling smile. She was playful and dangerous.
The French actress Jeanne Moreau, who became one of the
most popular and bewitching film stars
of the 1960s, died July 31 at 89 in Paris. Her career spanned seven decades and
nearly 150 movie and TV roles, establishing her as the thinking man’s femme
fatale.
Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, François Truffaut, Louis Malle,
Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Jacques Demy, Tony Richardson and Rainer Werner
Fassbinder were among the international directors who cast her in their movies.
Most spoke rapturously of Ms. Moreau — Welles called her “the greatest actress
in the world” — and a few became her lovers.
Critics and audiences found Ms. Moreau spellbinding,
particularly in roles in which she embodied liberated sexuality or in which her
outward composure masked boundless complexity. Movie scholar David Shipman once
described her as the “art-house love goddess.”
She was associated with the French New Wave,
a filmmaking movement that swept away conventional characters and storytelling
forms. Perhaps her most enduring New Wave film was Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim”
(1962), in which she played a free spirit at the center of a love triangle set
before and after World War I. She portrayed an exquisite chameleon, elusive and shape-shifting, opposite male leads (Oskar
Werner and Henri Serre) who project their desires on her.
Ms. Moreau was radiantly feminine in the
role, even in scenes where she sported a fake moustache, a cap and a cigar. She
sings the film’s theme song, “Le
Tourbillon de la Vie,” whose lyrics about a “femme fatale who
was fatal to me” anticipate the film’s tragic climax.
The film was startling, observed film historian Jeanine
Basinger, for its portrayal of a woman demanding “equal choices, equal
sexuality without being presented as a harpy.” Ms. Moreau’s performance helped
elevate her to the front rank of stardom.
“There is no actress in Hollywood or Europe who can match
the depth and breadth of her art,” Time magazine rhapsodized in a 1965 cover
story about Ms. Moreau, noting her portrayal of a nun during the French
Revolution in “Le Dialogue des Carmélites” (1960) and a modern courtesan in “Eva”(1962).
Ms. Moreau excelled in stories of compulsion.
In Malle’s “The Lovers” (1958),
she abandons her child and bourgeois husband for a stranger who rekindles her
sexual ardor. The film’s depiction of female sexual pleasure figured in a U.S.
Supreme Court test of obscenity laws, prompting Justice Potter Stewart’s
memorable line about pornography: “I know it when I see it, and the motion
picture involved in this case is not that.”
In Demy’s “Bay
of Angels” (1963), sporting a chic Pierre Cardin suit and
peroxide blond hair, she is a gambling addict on the French Riviera who has
forsaken her son. In Buñuel’s “Diary
of a Chambermaid” (1964), she plays a servant who arouses and
manipulates sexual and political tensions.
In Truffaut’s “The
Bride Wore Black” (1968), she methodically wreaks vengeance on
the men responsible for the death of her husband on their wedding day. The plot
of Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” is heavily indebted to the Truffault film.
Basinger said Ms. Moreau continued to maintain a high-caliber
career in Europe, but she did not enjoy the lasting prominence of European
actresses such as Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, who embraced
Hollywood and its publicity machine.
In contrast, Ms. Moreau avoided the long
contracts often demanded by big studios, likening them to prison terms. She
took isolated roles in American films, but her mystique was often lost amid the
teeming international casts of movies such as “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1964).
She said she accepted a part in “5 Branded Women” (1960), about Yugoslav
partisans during World War II, because she needed to pay back taxes in a hurry.
“Not only did they shave all my hair off, but the picture
was bad,” she later told the New York Times. “I considered myself justly
punished.”
In Europe, Ms. Moreau used her star power to help novice
directors and actors she believed in. Her melancholy character helped ground
“Going Places” (1974), an otherwise bawdy, anti-feminist comedy that helped
make Gérard Depardieu a star. In the action thriller “La Femme Nikita” (1990),
she was an etiquette specialist trying to mold an unruly street urchin (Anne
Parillaud) into a trained assassin with feminine wiles.
“Smile when you don’t know something,” Ms.
Moreau’s character deadpans. “You won’t be any smarter, but it’s nice for the
others.”
Raised in poverty
Jeanne Moreau was born in Paris on Jan. 23, 1928, and
grew up in an unhappy home. Her mother was an English-born chorus-line dancer,
and her French father, a former cafe owner, was mercurial and quick to rage. At
one point, during the Nazi occupation, the family lived in a one-room flat
above a brothel.
Theater became an escape from poverty and the tumult of
home. She often skipped school to attend plays and in 1944, at 16, saw a
production of Jean Anouilh’s “Antigone.”
“I was amazed because in ‘Antigone’ the girl rebels,” Ms.
Moreau told her biographer, Marianne Gray. “She resists authority. She is not
afraid of time. I wanted to be like her.”
In 1948, she became one of the youngest members in the
history of the venerable Comédie-Française. She began to draw praise for her
performances on the Parisian stage, notably as the sex-starved Maggie in a 1956
staging of Tennessee Williams’s melodrama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
By that time, she had been in nearly two
dozen movies, usually squandered in parts as a gangster’s moll. But Malle, a
little-known documentary filmmaker, was dazzled by “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” He
went backstage and begged Ms. Moreau to star in his first feature, a low-budget
drama called “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958).
Her agent called it beneath her talent. But Ms. Moreau
liked Malle’s passion, and she fired her agent.
The film, now regarded as a minor classic, was a crime
story: two lovers plot to kill the woman’s wealthy husband. For long stretches
of the film, elevated by trumpeter Miles Davis’s moody
score, the camera follows Ms. Moreau wandering Parisian streets,
pondering the outcome of the plan she set in motion.
“Her greatness is, of course, that in the space of a few
seconds, you can see changes of mood on her face,” Malle told Gray.
Ms. Moreau’s subsequent performance in “The Lovers” led
to a cascade of roles as scheming adulteresses and frozen-souled wives. Among
them were director Roger Vadim’s jazz-scored version of “Les
Liaisons Dangereuses” (1959); “Moderato Cantabile” (1960),
co-starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as her working-class lover; and Antonioni’s “La
Notte” (1961) opposite Marcello Mastroianni as her equally numbed husband.
She made movie choices that seemed indiscriminate but
were based mostly on her admiration for the director.
She took small parts to work for Welles, who cast her as
a drunken flirt in “The Trial” (1962),
from the Franz Kafka story, and as the wench Doll Tearsheet in “Chimes at
Midnight” (1965).
For Malle, she agreed to “Viva Maria!” (1965),
a ludicrous musical comedy that featured her with Brigitte Bardot as unlikely
sisters and Latin American revolutionaries. In “Mademoiselle”(1966),
directed by Tony Richardson, she played a sexually frustrated and sociopathic
village schoolmarm who poisons wells and sets fires.
In the late 1970s, Ms. Moreau directed two movies that
received critical acclaim for their thoughtful portrayal of women’s lives —
“Lumiere” (1976) and “The Adolescent” (1979). But she soon returned to her
career as an actress on film and stage, driving herself forward through bouts
of depression.
She made a triumphant world tour in the late 1980s in “Le
Récit de la Servante Zerline,” a nearly two-hour monologue about the
complicated life of a maid. The play brought renewed demand among movie
directors as varied as Wim Wenders (“Until the End of the World,” 1991), Ismail
Merchant (“The Proprietor,” 1996) and Amos Gitai (“One
Day You’ll Understand,” 2008), among many others.
Ms. Moreau’s marriages to actor and screenwriter
Jean-Louis Richard and film director William Friedkin ended in divorce. She had
a son, Jérôme, from her first marriage. A list of survivors could not be immediately
confirmed. The French president’s office announced the death but did not
disclose further details.
Ms. Moreau was romantically linked at times to Malle,
Cardin and Richardson. She seldom lacked for male companionship, once
explaining in the sort of epigram that became her trademark in interviews, “Age
does not protect you from love, but love, to some extent, protects you from
age.”
In an unceasing career, Ms. Moreau imbued her craft with
an intuitive grasp of character and sustained intensity.
“How annoyed I get to hear people speak of ‘the
profession of acting,’ ” she once told Time. “The only thing worse is when they
say, ‘You’re a real pro.’ Acting is not a profession at all; it’s a way of
living — one completes the other.
“What an actor needs is a sense of involvement, an
unconscious familiarity with his role, nothing more than that,” she added.
“There’s no point in pursuing the character’s real-life experience. It’s absurd
to think you can truly enter it for a tame little week, anyhow. I never study
my role at all before the camera starts turning and then pffft! —it begins.”
