Viviane Romance

Biography: life and films

Viviane Romance's reign as the queen of French cinema was brief but magnificent. For a full decade, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, she was the quintessential screen vamp, a seductive and lethally charismatic temptress who was more popular with audiences than Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan, and many times more sensuous. As photogenic and effortlessly alluring as any Hollywood diva of this era, she was also an immensely talented actress, and in a career that took in seventy film appearances she was the definitive French screen goddess, the baddest girl on the block - and the most desirable.

Romance's original name was Pauline Ronacher Ortmans. She was born on 4th July 1912, in Roubaix in northern France. She was just 13 when she started out as a dancer at the Sarah-Bernhardt theatre, before joining the Moulin Rouge troupe a year later. By the time she was 16, she was appearing in operettas and boulevard theatre, equipping herself with the singing, dancing and acting skills that would serve her in good stead in her subsequent film career. She once had the temerity to slap the famous singer Mistinguett in the face during a rehearsal. In 1931, she acquired even greater notoriety when she revealed she was pregnant after being elected Miss Paris at the age of 18. The title was hastily snatched away from her but the celebrity this brought her did no harm as she insinuated her way into the movies. Even before she had set foot in a film studio she had a reputation as a bad girl.

Viviane Romance's screen debut was as an extra in Henry Roussell's Paris Girls (1929). Several bit parts followed, including one in Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931). In Claude Autant-Lara's Ciboulette (1934) she gets to share the limelight with rival supervamp Ginette Leclerc and she is hard to miss as the cigarette seller in Fritz Lang's Liliom (1934). She then made her presence felt in Julien Duvivier's La Bandera (1935) and Edmond T. Gréville's Princesse Tam Tam (1935) (stealing just a little thunder from the film's star, Josephine Baker).

It was Duvivier who gave the actress her first important screen role in La Belle équipe (1936) - as the satanic femme fatale who comes between buddies Jean Gabin and Charles Vanel and causes one to destroy the other, as well as their happy Utopian dream. This is the role that made Romance's name as France's screen vamp - it's no accident that she played a virtually identical role in Naples au baiser de feu the following year, this time dynamiting a beautiful friendship between Michel Simon and Tino Rossi. In between these two films, G.W. Pabst more than got his money's worth from the actress by employing her as a cabaret singer in a showstopper scene in Mademoiselle Docteur (1937).

With her nearest rivals - Michèle Morgan and Danielle Darrieux - too young and too innocent-looking to pose any serious challenge, Viviane Romance became the unrivalled French sex goddess of her age. Even when Ginette Leclerc came on the scene a few years later she was still the vamp of first choice. The archetype of the loose woman never seemed to bother the actress and she always managed to bring a unique identity to each of her screen creations. In Jean Grémillon's L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1937), she is the worst example of her sex, not only promiscuous but also a bad mother to boot. In Pierre Chenal's La Maison du Maltais (1938) she is a two-timing prostitute who manages to engage our sympathies despite her duplicitous antics. And in Jeff Musso's Le Puritain (1937), we are resolutely on her side as she plays the unfortunate streetwalker who brings out the beast in Jean-Louis Barrault. In G.W. Pabst's L'Esclave blanche (1939), she makes the mistake of forming her own one-woman female emancipation movement in Turkey, and only just escapes with her chastity belt and head intact. Romance completes her process of rehabilitation with Roger Richebé's La Tradition de minuit (1939), now playing a respectable girl who likes to show off her singing talent whilst solving a murder mystery.

At this rate, audiences would have been justified in expecting to see Viviane Romance as the Virgin Mary within a few years. Abel Gance continued the process of purification by giving the actress the lead in his gloriously overblown melodrama Vénus aveugle (1941). Here, Romance plays a woman of the most stoical kind who, on realising she is losing her eyesight, throws over her lover so that she can work as a singer to support her crippled sister, gets pregnant, loses her child and finally goes blind. Not surprisingly, audiences were not massively impressed with this ludicrous example of female martyrdom and the film sank without trace, wrecking Gance's career in the process. Romance somehow survived this train wreck and was soon up to her old tricks, inflaming male passions and usually paying the price. It was only a question of time before she ended up playing the hot blooded gypsy girl Carmen, although it's a shame that Christian-Jaque failed to equip her with a suitable mate in his 1943 take on the famous Prosper Mérimée story.

During the Occupation, Romance resolutely refused to have anything to do with the German-run Continental Films but ended up being coerced into making a tour of Germany with a troupe consisting of other notable French actors - including Danielle Darrieux, Albert Préjean and Suzy Prim. This led her to be imprisoned for a few days after the Liberation, but she was released without charge. After the war, Romance was as depraved as ever as the vile schemer who drives Michel Simon to his doom in Julien Duvivier's Panique (1947).

By now the age of the vamp had passed and the actress was beginning to look distinctly dépassé. She had no choice but to broaden her repertoire, something that Marcel L'Herbier and Henri Decoin did their best to help her with, casting her first as Jeanne de la Motte, perhaps the most notorious adventuress in French history, in L'Affaire du collier de la Reine (1946) and then as the professional poison-maker La Voisin in L'Affaire des poisons (1955). In between these two period romps, Romance had a brief and fairly disastrous stint as a film producer, after having declined a Hollywood contract in 1948.

Romance's first production was Maya (1949), a dreamlike interpretation of a play by Simon Gantillon that presented the actress at her most exotic and enigmatic. Masterfully directed by Raymond Bernard, this was Romance's last great screen role. Here she is revealed to us not as the earthy temptress of previous years, but as a mythic siren of the imagination - a haunting mirage of the perfect woman that all men desire but no man can ever possess. Every other film that Romance produced in the mid-1950s (La Chair et le diable, Pitié pour les vamps, L'inspecteur connaît la musique) was a disaster, partly because they were so ineptly directed by her third husband, Jean Josipovici. No surprise then that Romance and Josipovici divorced not long after their final misjudged cinematic collaboration.

While she was being led to financial ruin and professional oblivion by Josipovici, Romance supplemented her income by spicing up some pretty nondescript Italian films - Ettore Giannini's Gli uomini sono némicli (1948), Basilio Franchina's Legione straniera (1952) and Steno's L'uomo, la bestia e la virtù (1953). She also had a go at introducing Frank Villard to the deadly sin of lust in a popular anthology film, Les Sept péchés capitaux (1952). Dismayed by the failure of her production company, and disillusioned with cinema in general, Romance retired in 1956 and withdrew to Saint-Jeannet on the Côte d'Azur, taking up residence in an 11th century fortress, the Château de La Gaude, which she tried, unsuccessfully, to restore.

Seven years later, Romance was lured out of retirement by the prospect of working with her old friend Jean Gabin and rising star Alain Delon in Henri Verneuil's thriller Mélodie en sous-sol (1963). Her final film appearance was a decade later, in Claude Chabrol's Nada (1974). In 1986, the retired actress published her long-awaited memoirs, Romantique à mourir. Viviane Romance was 79 when she died from cancer, at a hospital in Nice on 25th September 1991. Her ashes were scattered in the grounds of her home in Saint-Jeannet.

Filmography

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