Jeanne Moreau

Biography: life and films

One of the most vivid emblems of the French New Wave, Jeanne Moreau was an actress of exceptional dedication and ability. In a career that spanned seven decades and over 140 films, she worked not only with some of the most important French film directors of her period - Jacques Becker, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, François Truffaut, André Techiné, Bertrand Blier - but also with such internationally renowned cineastes as Joseph Losey, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Luis Buñuel. Moreau's heyday was in the 1960s, when her sensual and often unsettling portrayals of femininity crisply evoked both the essence of the time and its moral concerns. As her voice deepened and grew huskier in later years, she became ever more alluring and she remained remarkably active in her profession right up until the end, working for cinema, television and the theatre well into her eighties. She was more than an actress. She was a phenomenon.

Jeanne Moreau was born in Paris on 23rd January 1928. Her father ran a restaurant; her mother was English, a former dancer at the Folies Bergère. Enamoured of the dramatic art, she started taking drama lessons at an early age, but her father, a staunch Catholic, was against her becoming an actress and threw her out. She entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1947 and she was soon performing with the Comédie-Française. She then joined the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), where she acted alongside Gérard Philipe - the two actors would later make a lethally seductive screen couple in Roger Vadim's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1960). Moreau's screen career got off to a modest start in the late 1940s, in supporting roles in Jean Stelli's Dernier amour (1949) and Richard Pottier's Meurtres (1950).

The actress had a small but noticeable presence as a gangster's moll in Jacques Becker's landmark polar Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) but her first real opportunity to scorch the celluloid with her sizzling sex appeal came when she was cast in the title role in Jean Dréville's historical drama La Reine Margot (1954). In interviews, Moreau later expressed disappointment with her early screen career and claims that her devotion to cinema began only when she fell in with directors who spurned the old conventions and the rigid hierarchies of the film industry. The turning point came in 1956 when Louis Malle gave her the leading role in his first feature Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, a stylish auteur take on the suspense thriller that is now recognised as an immediate precursor to the French New Wave. Moreau then took the lead in Malle's next film, Les Amants, portraying a liberated woman in an adulterous affair. The film caused an instant furore on account of its explicit, mould-breaking love scene, and this helped to cement not only the lead actress's fame but also her identification as a prominent symbol of female emancipation amid a burgeoning sexual revolution. This was further reinforced by the tortured roles that followed, in Peter Brook's Moderato cantabile (1960) (which won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival) and Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961).

It was through Louis Malle that Moreau first came into contact with François Truffaut, a prominent young film critic who had aspirations of becoming a film director himself. After giving her a humorous walk-on part in his debut feature, Les 400 coups (1959), Truffaut then cast the actress as the lead in his best-known film, the ménage à trois tragicomic drama Jules et Jim (1962). One of the great triumphs of the Nouvelle Vague, the film was a worldwide success and it not only made Moreau an international star, it also launched her career as a singer. The popularity of the song she improvised for the film (Le Tourbillon de la vie) led to two hit albums with the guitarist Serge Rezvani. The role of Catherine in Jules et Jim also came to define and (to a degree) limit Moreau's screen persona. Like the tempestuous Catherine, the actress was a passionate free spirit who was driven to take full advantage of the freedoms life had to offer her, to create her own code for living, rather than adhere to some prescribed, out-dated pattern of existence. Moreau's unstinting rejection of convention accounts for the extraordinary variety and richness of her acting career, as well as its abundant eccentricities.

With the actress now at the height of her celebrity, world class filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic were queuing up to make use of her talents. It makes an impressive roll call - Orson Welles (The Trial), Jacques Demy (La Baie des anges), Joseph Losey (Eva), Luis Buñuel (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre), Tony Richardson (Mademoiselle), Elia Kazan (The Last Tycoon). She entered into an unlikely gun-toting comedy partnership with Brigitte Bardot in Louis Malle's lively period romp Viva María! (1965), picking up a BAFTA along the way, and then returned to Truffaut for his Hitchcockian black comedy La Mariée était en noir (1968).

Although her box office appeal was by this time now on the wane, Moreau was still eagerly sought after by up-and-coming auteurs who could make full use of her abilities and willingness to explore some less familiar avenues of human experience. In Bertrand Blier's daring Les Valseuses (1974), she mischievously hooked up with Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere for another provocative three-in-a-bed arrangement. She worked with promising newcomer André Téchiné on Souvenirs d'en France (1975), and not long after this she found herself in the sublime world of erotic fantasy that is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982). It was her feisty role in Laurent Heynemann's La Vieille qui marchait dans la mer (1992) that won Moreau her only Best Actress César in 1992 - previously she had been nominated for her work on Jean-Pierre Mocky's Le Miraculé (1987) and Michel Deville's Le Paltoquet (1986). She was subsequently awarded two Honorary Césars (in 1995 and 2008). An honorary Oscar came her way in 1998, in recognition of her immense contribution to cinema. And in 2000 she was the first woman to be elected to France's Académie des beaux-arts.

It was Orson Welles, the man who dubbed her the 'greatest actress in the world', who encouraged Moreau to turn her hand to filmmaking. She directed two engaging fictional dramas - Lumière (1976) and L'Adolescente (1979), and also made an affectionate documentary on the actress Lillian Gish in 1983. Whilst pursuing a film career, she returned periodically to the stage, and met with considerable acclaim for her part in Hermann Broch's 1986 production of Le Récit de la servante Zerline. In 2001, Moreau had the opportunity to play one of her literary heroes, Marguerite Duras, in Josée Dayan's Cet amour-là (2001). She had previously worked with Duras on one of her most interesting films, Nathalie Granger (1972). In the 2000s, the actress still had a formidable screen presence and was well-served by such prominent auteurs as Amos Gitai (Désengagement, Plus tard tu comprendras) and François Ozon (Le Temps qui reste). Her last film appearances were in Ilmar Raag's Une Estonienne à Paris (2012) and Alex Lutz's Le Talent de mes amis (2015).

Moreau's private life was as unencumbered by social norms as her professional career. She married twice - to the French actor Jean-Louis Richard (who gave her a son, Jérôme Richard) and American film director William Friedkin - although both marriages were short-lived and ended in an amicable parting. She had close intimate relationships with many of the directors she worked with, including Truffaut and Richardson. Whilst devoted to her art as an actress, Moreau was also a compulsive bibliophile and, in the course of her life, she became closely acquainted with many distinguished authors - including Henry Miller, Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith and Marguerite Duras. After a career that could not have been better suited to her temperament, nor more dizzyingly varied, Jeanne Moreau passed away peacefully at her Parisian apartment on 31st July 2017, aged 89.

Filmography

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