Ginette Leclerc

Biography: life and films

Ginette Leclerc may have a reputation as one of the archetypal vamps of French cinema in the 1930s and '40s, but, in her half-century spanning career, she proved to be a far more versatile actress than this would imply. Her birth name was Geneviève Lucie Menut and she was born in Paris on 9th February 1912. She grew up in Montmartre, where her parents ran a jewellers' store. From an early age, she intended to become a professional dancer, but her parents thwarted these ambitions and, at the age of 18, she married a man who was 16 years her senior, Lucien Leclerc. It was not a successful marriage and they divorced in July 1939. Despite parental pressure, the young Ginette never gave up her hopes of a career in showbusiness. After earning a few francs posing for naughty postcards she began appearing in films as an extra, as early as 1932. She can be noticed in Anatole Litvak's Cette vieille canaille (1933) and had a small role in Claude Autant-Lara Ciboulette (1933), but her first part of any substance was as the maid Victoire (playing opposite Fernandel) in Marc Allégret's L'Hôtel du libre échange (1934), a spirited adaptation of a Georges Feydeau farce.

Leclerc's reputation for playing immoral women began when she took on the role of Pierre Blanchar's monstrous wife in Pierre Chenal's L'Homme de nulle part (1937). This is very different from the character she plays in Christian-Jaque's lively comedy Les Dégourdis de la onzième (1937), who is not so much a schemer as a flighty young woman who knows when she is on to a good thing - in this case assisting in a re-enactment of a Roman orgy with Fernandel and André Lefaur. Leclerc's character in Léonide Moguy's Prison sans barreaux (1938) offers us an even more worrying example of female depravity, but it was her portrayal of the woman who thoughtlessly abandons her husband (Raimu) and causes a bread shortage in Marcel Pagnol's La Femme du boulanger (1938) that made her a star.

With her smouldering eyes, sensuous allure and seductively raffish voice, it was inevitable that Ginette Leclerc would rapidly become typecast as the 'bad woman'. Like her contemporary Viviane Romance, she would spend her glory years being pretty well confined to playing loose and monstrous women of varying degrees of venality and vampishness. She played a troublesome prostitute in Claude Autant-Lara's Le Ruisseau (1938), a seductive temptress in Jean Delannoy's Fièvres (1941) and a sizzling circus performer in Le Briseur de chaînes (1941). It wasn't until H.G. Clouzot's Le Corbeau that she had a role worthy of her talents. The part of Denise in Clouzot's film, a hypochondriac who can't help attracting suspicion, gave Leclerc a chance to turn in a more nuanced and complex portrayal. In her next film for the German-run company Continental, Le Val d'enfer (1943), she was back to playing the evil home wrecker, a symbol of everything the Vichy regime despised.

Ginette Leclerc's association with Continental caused her some grief after the Liberation - this and the fact that, during the Occupation, she and her partner Lucien Gallas had run a nightclub frequented by German soldiers and Nazi collaborators. The actress spent a whole year in prison without being tried and when she was released she had some difficulty finding work afterwards. On her return to cinema after the war, it was usually in dismal films that have now long been forgotten such as Guillaume Radot's Chemins sans lois (1946) and André Hunebelle's Millionnaires d'un jour (1949). Just when her career appeared to be over, Marcello Pagliero came to her rescue with the moody neo-realist piece Un homme marche dans la ville (1951). That same year she appeared with Jean Gabin (another actor struggling to make a comeback after the war) in Max Ophüls's Le Plaisir (1951).

In the mid to late 1950s, Leclerc appeared in a number of noteworthy films, but now she was relegated to supporting roles. She worked with Gabin again on two films for Gilles Grangier - Gas-oil (1955) and Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), and cropped up in a wide range of films, including Henri Verneuil's Les Amants du Tage (1954), Jean Boyer's Le Chômeur de Clochemerle (1957) and Marcel Camus's Le Chant du monde (1965). One of the strangest films she appeared in is Walerian Borowczyk's fantasy Goto, l'île d'amour (1968), a bizarre satire of East European communism. She accompanied Gabin one last time in Michel Audiard's Le Drapeau noir flotte sur la marmite (1971). Over the next few years she made little more than cameo appearances in a curious mix of films that took in Jean-Claude Brialy's Les Volets clos (1973) and Jean Yanne's Chobizenesse (1975).

Ginette Leclerc was 65 when she made her final film appearance, in René Richon's La Barricade du point du jour (1977). She continued working for television until 1981, appearing in popular series such as Les Enquêtes du commissaire Maigret (1973, 1979) and Les Cinq dernières minutes (1958-1981). In 1963 she published her memoirs, Ma vie privée, which make fascinating reading. It is also worth mentioning that in addition to her film work, Leclerc participated in several stage productions, including Marcel Archard's Noix de coco (1935), Jean-Paul Sartre's La Putain respectueuse (1949), Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1957) and Marcel Aymé's Clérambard (1961). Ginette Leclerc lived until the age of 79, dying from cancer on 2nd January 1992. She is buried at the Pantin cemetery in the city where she spent her entire life, Paris.

Filmography

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