Jacqueline Audry

Biography: life and films

Jacqueline Audry holds a significant place in French history as the first woman director to have any impact on French cinema after WWII. She only directed fifteen films, mostly literary adaptations, and her style was already dated by the time the French New Wave came on the scene. Audry may not have been a great innovator and most of her films today appear pretty ordinary for their time, but she was ahead of her time in her depiction of female sexuality and the female characters in her films are the most fully developed of any French film made in the 1950s. Audry had some commercial success but she was not a favourite of the critics - indeed she was lambasted for the supposedly scandalous content of her films. Today, she is criminally overlooked and her work deserves a far wider appreciation than it currently has.

Born in Orange, France, on 25th September 1908, Jacqueline Audry attended the Lycée Molière in Paris with her elder sister Colette Audry (who would become a novelist and screenwriter). She started out in the film business by working as an assistant to several distinguished directors, including Max Ophüls (Le Roman de Werther (1938)), G.W. Pabst (Jeunes filles en détresse (1939)) and Georges Lacombe (Les Musiciens du ciel (1940)). It wasn't until 1943 that Audry directed her first film, a short entitled Les Chevaux du Vercors.

At the time Audry started making films, the French film industry was male dominated and opportunities for women were few and far between. The first feature that she directed - Les Malheurs de Sophie (based on the novel of the same title by the Countess of Ségur) - was heavily censored and no longer exists. She followed this two years later with Sombre dimanche (1948), and then had her first hit with Gigi (1949), based on a popular novella by Colette, an author she was extremely fond of. The film not only made Audry's name as a director, it also made its lead actress, Danièle Delorme, an overnight star. Audry and Delorme collaborated on two further Colette adaptations, Minne, l'ingénue libertine (1950) and Mitsou (1956), the latter of which was widely condemned for its explicit depiction of a love affair outside marriage.

Audry's best film is, arguably, Olivia, adapted from a partly autobiographical novel by Dorothy Bussy. Not only is the film beautifully directed, scripted with depth and sensitivity by the director's husband Pierre Laroche and sister Colette Audry, it also broke new territory with its honest depiction of a lesbian relationship between a school headmistress (played by a superb Edwige Feuillère) and one of her students. Another inspired film was Audry's adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's well-known play Huis clos (1954). Le Secret du chevalier d'Éon (1959), Audry's most lavish production, makes a good historical romp but pales in comparison with her earlier work.

By the early 1960s, Jacqueline Audry had been overtaken by the Nouvelle Vague and her attempts to keep up with changing tastes - such as her lame stab at a comedic road movie, Les Petits matins - mostly fell flat. She directed one other notable adaptation, Fruits amers (1967), from a play by her sister, and contributed some scenes to Renzo Cerrato's Le Lys de mer (1969), before ending her directing career with a Franco-Polish television serial on the life of Honoré de Balzac, Un grand amour de Balzac (1973). Jacqueline Audry was 68 when she was killed in a road accident in Yvelines, France, on 22 June 1977.

Filmography

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