Edwige Feuillère

Biography: life and films

In an acting career that spanned 65 years, Edwige Feuillère came to be regarded as one of France's most distinguished actresses. Although she appeared in over sixty films and became one of the great stars of French cinema in the 1940s and 50s, she won greater acclaim for her stage work and is widely considered the greatest French stage actress of her day. Feuillère thrived on challenging and often controversial roles, and was eagerly sought after by some of the greatest film and theatre directors of her time. The poet and playwright Jean Cocteau gave her one of her most celebrated roles in his play L'Aigle à deux têtes and said that she will forever be remembered as the Queen of Snow, Blood, Pleasure and Death.

Feuillère's real name was Edwige Caroline Cunati-Koenig and she was born on 29th October 1907 at Vesoul in the Franche-Comté region of France. Her father was an Italian engineer, her mother French, and she spent her early childhood in Italy. Following the failure of several of her father's business ventures, the young Edwige moved back to France with her family shortly after WWI and attended a private school near Dijon. Once she had made up her mind to become an actress, she enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire in 1928 and, having graduated with distinction three years later, she had no difficulty being admitted into that most prestigious of theatrical troupes, the Comédie-Française.

It was around this time that Edwige Feuillère began her long and illustrious screen career, in a series of comedy shorts for Paramount. Under her original stage name Cora Lynn, she made her feature debut in Karl Anton's comedy Le Cordon bleu, having appeared in a short film entitled La Fine combine with an unknown vaudevillian named Fernandel. For some time afterwards Feuillère was typecast as the vamp in a series of burlesque comedies and lacklustre melodramas. Her first substantial film role was that of the eponymous heroine of Abel Gance's film Lucrèce Borgia (1935), a role that brought her instant fame and established her imposing screen persona - an aloof, seductive coolness combined with an austere beauty. Feuillère was soon being courted by some of the leading filmmakers of the day. Max Ophüls gave her the principal role in two of his films, Sans lendemain (1940) and De Mayerling à Sarajevo (1940), and she also took the lead in Maurice Tourneur's hit 1942 film Mam'zelle Bonaparte and Marcel L'Herbier's L'Honorable Catherine (1942). Other notable films of this period include Léo Joannon's L'Emigrante (1940) and Jacques de Baroncelli's La Duchesse de Langeais (1941).

Just as her screen career was starting to take off, Edwige Feuillère continued her stage work and in 1939, at the Théâtre des Galeries Saint-Hubert in Brussels, she first played the part that was to become her most famous, that of Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas' La Dame aux camélias. It was a role that was perfect for Feuillère and she reprised it several times on stage over the following two decades. The actress also distinguished herself in a production of Jean Giraudoux's Sodome et Gomorrhe at the Théâtre Hébertot in Paris in 1942, and several stagings of Jean Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot.

By the late 1940s, Edwige Feuillère was accepted as one of the leading French film actresses of her generation. She not only worked with some of France's greatest film directors, she was also partnered with some of the most iconic film actors of the day. She played opposite Gérard Philipe in Georges Lampin's L'Idiot (1946) and Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau's L'Aigle à deux têtes (1948) (adapted from a 1946 stage play in which she had starred). In Claude-Autant Lara's Le Blé en herbe (1954), Feuillère took on her most controversial role, that of the unnamed woman (la dame en blanc) who wilfully seduces an adolescent boy. The controversy surrounding this role may be what precipitated the sudden decline in Feuillère's film career. Over the following decade, she appeared in around a dozen or so films, none of which matched her acting talents. She was however well-served by Patrice Chéreau's La Chair de l'orchidée (1975), in which she made her last film appearance.

As her film work declined, Feuillère's stage career flourished and having performed La Dame aux camélias one last time in 1959 she appeared in around another thirty stage plays over the next three decades. These include André Barsacq's 1971 production of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth (Doux Oiseau de jeunesse) at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris and two stagings of Jean Giraudoux's La Folle de Chaillot in 1974 and 1975. In 1992, under the direction of Jean-Luc Tardieu, she starred in a show entitled Edwige Feuillère en Scène, in which she performed extracts from some of her most famous roles. Her final acting role was that of the Princesse Beaumont-Chauvry in the 1995 French television film La Duchesse de Langeais, directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe.

Throughout her career, Edwige Feuillère was showered with plaudits for her stage and film work. In 1983, she was awarded a Molière for her stage work, and in 1984 she received a honorary César for her contribution to cinema. She was also recognised as a Grand officier de la Légion d'honneur. She was 91 when she died, in Paris on the 13th November 1998, just a few days after suffering a mild heart attack when she learned of the death of Jean Marais, one of her dearest friends. The French nation mourned Feuillère's passing almost as if she were a former head of state, and the tributes that were made to her were sincere and deeply felt, a respectful homage to her achievements as an actress. In March 2007, a square in the 7th arrondissement of Paris was renamed in her honour and now proudly bears the name of the woman who came to be regarded as the Grand Dame of French theatre.

Filmography

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