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- Actress
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Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Ruth Augusta (Favor) and Harlow Morrell Davis, a patent attorney. Her parents divorced when she was 10. She and her sister were raised by their mother. Her early interest was dance. To Bette, dancers led a glamorous life, but then she discovered the stage, and gave up dancing for acting. To her, it presented much more of a challenge.
After graduation from Cushing Academy, she was refused admittance to Eva Le Gallienne's Manhattan Civic Repertory. She enrolled in John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School and was the star pupil. She was in the off-Broadway play "The Earth Between" (1923), and her Broadway debut in 1929 was in "Broken Dishes". She also appeared in "Solid South". Late in 1930, she was hired by Universal, where she made her first film, called Bad Sister (1931). When she arrived in Hollywood, the studio representative who went to meet her train left without her because he could find no one who looked like a movie star. An official at Universal complained she had "as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville" and her performance in "Bad Sister" didn't impress.
In 1932, she signed a seven-year deal with Warner Brothers Pictures. Her first film with them was The Man Who Played God (1932). She became a star after this appearance, known as the actress that could play a variety of very strong and complex roles. More fairly successful movies followed, but it was the role of Mildred Rogers in RKO's Of Human Bondage (1934) that would give Bette major acclaim from the film critics. She had a significant number of write-in votes for the Best Actress Oscar, but didn't win. Warner Bros. felt their seven-year deal with Bette was more than justified. They had a genuine star on their hands. With this success under her belt, she began pushing for stronger and more meaningful roles. In 1935, she received her first Oscar for her role in Dangerous (1935) as Joyce Heath.
In 1936, she was suspended without pay for turning down a role that she deemed unworthy of her talent. She went to England, where she had planned to make movies, but was stopped by Warner Bros. because she was still under contract to them. They did not want her to work anywhere. Although she sued to get out of her contract, she lost. Still, they began to take her more seriously after that.
Returning after losing her lawsuit, her roles improved dramatically. In 1938, Bette received a second Academy Award win for her work in Jezebel (1938) opposite the soon-to-be-legendary Henry Fonda. The only role she didn't get that she wanted was Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939). Warners wouldn't loan her to David O. Selznick unless he hired Errol Flynn to play Rhett Butler, which both Selznick and Davis thought was a terrible choice. It was rumored she had numerous affairs, among them George Brent and William Wyler, and she was married four times, three of which ended in divorce. She admitted her career always came first.
She made many successful films in the 1940s, but each picture was weaker than the last and by the time her Warner Brothers contract had ended in 1949, she had been reduced to appearing in such films as the unintentionally hilarious Beyond the Forest (1949). She made a huge comeback in 1950 when she replaced an ill Claudette Colbert in, and received an Oscar nomination for, All About Eve (1950). She worked in films through the 1950s, but her career eventually came to a standstill, and in 1961 she placed a now famous Job Wanted ad in the trade papers.
She received an Oscar nomination for her role as a demented former child star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). This brought about a new round of super-stardom for generations of fans who were not familiar with her work. Two years later, she starred in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). Bette was married four times.
In 1977 she received the AFI's Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1979 she won a Best Actress Emmy for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979). In 1977-78 she moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles and filmed a pilot for the series Hotel (1983), which she called Brothel. She refused to do the TV series and suffered a stroke during this time.
Her last marriage, to actor Gary Merrill, lasted ten years, longer than any of the previous three. In 1985, her daughter Barbara Davis ("B.D.") Hyman published a scandalous book about Bette called "My Mother's Keeper." Bette worked in the later 1980s in films and TV, even though a stroke had impaired her appearance and mobility. She wrote a book, "This 'N That", during her recovery from the stroke. Her last book was "Bette Davis, The Lonely Life", issued in paperback in 1990. It included an update from 1962 to 1989. She wrote the last chapter in San Sebastian, Spain.
Sadly, Bette Davis died on October 6, 1989, of metastasized breast cancer, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France. Many of her fans refused to believe she was gone.- Born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Episcopal minister Robert Fletcher and his wife Estelle, both of whom were deaf, Louise Fletcher was introduced to performing at a young age by the aunt who taught her to speak. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, she took a trip out west with her roommates, finding herself in Los Angeles without enough money to return home. She took a temporary job as a receptionist and signed up for acting classes at night. Soon she was working regularly in television and film, but after marrying producer Jerry Bick and having two sons, the actress took a long hiatus to raise her children.
Returning to work in 1974 in Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (1974), Fletcher came to the attention of director Milos Forman, who was casting the difficult role of the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). She won the role -- and then the Academy Award -- portraying deadly, inflexible Nurse Ratched, who has since become a cultural icon. Numerous film roles followed, including co-starring turns with Peter Falk in The Cheap Detective (1978) and with Richard Burton in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Fletcher has appeared in a number of science fiction and horror classics such as Firestarter (1984), Brainstorm (1983), and Flowers in the Attic (1987).
Though she earned an Emmy Award nomination for her recurring role on Picket Fences (1992), Fletcher is perhaps best known to recent television audiences as Kai Winn from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) and as Nora Bloom from the cult classic VR.5 (1995). - Actor
- Additional Crew
- Director
Max von Sydow was born Carl Adolf von Sydow on April 10, 1929 in Lund, Skåne, Sweden, to a middle-class family. He was the son of Baroness Maria Margareta (Rappe), a teacher, and Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, an ethnologist and folklore professor. His surname traces back to his partial German ancestry.
When he was in high school, he and a few fellow students, including Yvonne Lombard, started a theatre club which encouraged his interest in acting. After conscription, he began to study at the Royal Dramatic Theatre's acting school (1948-1951), together with Lars Ekborg, Margaretha Krook and Ingrid Thulin. His first role was as Nils the crofter in Alf Sjöberg's Only a Mother (1949). After graduation, he worked at the city theatres in Norrköping and Malmö.
His work in the movies by Ingmar Bergman (especially The Seventh Seal (1957), including the iconic scenes in which he plays chess with Death) made him well-known internationally, and he started to get offers from abroad. His career abroad began with him playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965); Hawaii (1966) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966). Since then, his career includes very different kind of characters, like Karl Oskar Nilsson in The Emigrants (1971); Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist (1973); Joubert the assassin in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon (1980); the villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Never Say Never Again (1983); Liet-Kynes in Dune (1984) the artist Frederick in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); Lassefar in Pelle the Conqueror (1987), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination; Dr. Peter Ingham in Awakenings (1990); Lamar Burgess in Minority Report (2002) and The Renter in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), which earned him his second Academy Award nomination.
He became one of Sweden's most admired and professional actors, and is the only male Swedish actor to receive an Oscar nomination. He was nominated twice: for Pelle the Conqueror (1987) in 1988 and for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) in 2012. He received the Guldbagge Award for Best Director in his directing debut, the drama film Ved vejen (1988). In 2016, he joined the sixth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones (2011) as the Three-eyed Raven, which earned him his Primetime Emmy Award nomination.
Max von Sydow died on March 8, 2020, in Provence, France, and was survived by his wife Catherine Brelet and four children. He was 90.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916 in Tokyo, Japan to British parents, Lilian Augusta (Ruse), a former actress, and Walter Augustus de Havilland, an English professor and patent attorney. Her sister Joan, later to become famous as Joan Fontaine, was born the following year. Her surname comes from her paternal grandfather, whose family was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Her parents divorced when Olivia was just three years old, and she moved with her mother and sister to Saratoga, California.
After graduating from high school, where she fell prey to the acting bug, Olivia enrolled in Mills College in Oakland, where she participated in the school play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and was spotted by Max Reinhardt. She so impressed Reinhardt that he picked her up for both his stage version and, later, the Warner Bros. film version in 1935. She again was so impressive that Warner executives signed her to a seven-year contract. No sooner had the ink dried on the contract than Olivia appeared in three more films: The Irish in Us (1935), Alibi Ike (1935), and Captain Blood (1935), this last with the man with whom her career would be most closely identified: heartthrob Errol Flynn. He and Olivia starred together in eight films during their careers. In 1939 Warner Bros. loaned her to David O. Selznick for the classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Playing sweet Melanie Hamilton, Olivia received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, only to lose out to one of her co-stars in the film, Hattie McDaniel.
After GWTW, Olivia returned to Warner Bros. and continued to churn out films. In 1941 she played Emmy Brown in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), which resulted in her second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. Again she lost, this time to her sister Joan for her role in Suspicion (1941). After that strong showing, Olivia now demanded better, more substantial roles than the "sweet young thing" slot into which Warners had been fitting her. The studio responded by placing her on a six-month suspension, all of the studios at the time operating under the policy that players were nothing more than property to do with as they saw fit. As if that weren't bad enough, when her contract with Warners was up, she was told that she needed to make up the time lost because of the suspension. Irate, she sued the studio, and for the length of the court battle she didn't appear in a single film. The result, however, was worth it. In a landmark decision, the court said that not only would Olivia not need to make up the time, but also that all performers would be limited to a seven-year contract that would include any suspensions handed down. This became known as the "de Havilland decision": no longer could studios treat their performers as chattel. Olivia returned to the screen in 1946 and made up for lost time by appearing in four films, one of which finally won her the Oscar that had so long eluded her: To Each His Own (1946), in which she played Josephine Norris to the delight of critics and audiences alike. Olivia was the strongest performer in Hollywood for the balance of the 1940s.
In 1948 she turned in another strong showing in The Snake Pit (1948) as Virginia Cunningham, a woman suffering a mental breakdown. The end result was another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but she lost to Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda (1948). As in the two previous years, she made only one film in 1949, but she again won a nomination and the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Heiress (1949). After a three-year hiatus, Olivia returned to star in My Cousin Rachel (1952). From that point on, she made few appearances on the screen but was seen on Broadway and in some television shows. Her last screen appearance was in The Fifth Musketeer (1979), and her last career appearance was in the TV movie The Woman He Loved (1988).
Her turbulent relationship with her only sibling, Joan Fontaine, was press fodder for many decades; the two were reported as having been permanently estranged since their mother's death in 1975, when Joan claimed that she had not been invited to the memorial service, which she only managed to hold off until she could arrive by threatening to go public. Joan also wrote in her memoir that her elder sister had been physically, psychologically, and emotionally abusive when they were young. And the iconic photo of Joan with her hand outstretched to congratulate Olivia backstage after the latter's first Oscar win and Olivia ignoring it because she was peeved by a comment Joan had made about Olivia's new husband, Marcus Goodrich, remained part of Hollywood lore for many years.
Nonetheless, late in life, Fontaine gave an interview in which she serenely denied any and all claims of an estrangement from her sister. When a reporter asked Joan if she and Olivia were friends, she replied, "Of course!" The reporter responded that rumors to the contrary must have been sensationalism and she replied, "Oh, right--they have to. Two nice girls liking each other isn't copy." Asked if she and Olivia were in communication and spoke to each other, Joan replied "Absolutely." When asked if there ever had been a time when the two did not get along to the point where they wouldn't speak with one another, Joan replied, again, "Never. Never. There is not a word of truth about that." When asked why people believe it, she replied "Oh, I have no idea. It's just something to say ... Oh, it's terrible." When asked if she had seen Olivia over the years, she replied, "I've seen her in Paris. And she came to my apartment in New York often." The reporter stated that all this was a nice thing to hear. Joan then stated, "Let me just say, Olivia and I have never had a quarrel. We have never had any dissatisfaction. We have never had hard words. And all this is press." Joan died in 2013.
During the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of GWTW in 1989, Olivia graciously declined requests for all interviews as the last of the four main stars. She enjoyed a quiet retirement in Paris, France, where she resided for many decades, and where she died on 26 July, 2020, at the age of 104.
As well as being the last surviving major cast member of some of cinema's most beloved pre-war and wartime film classics (including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939)), and one of the longest-lived major stars in film history, Olivia de Havilland was unquestionably the last surviving iconic figure from the peak of Hollywood's golden era during the late 1930s, and her passing truly marked the end of an era.- Actor
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A social misfit, Belzer was kicked out of every school he ever attended, due to his uncontrollable wit. His mother (Frances) died of breast cancer when Richard was 18. Four years later, his father (Charles) committed suicide. A dedication is written to Charles Belzer in Richard Belzer's "UFOs, JFK, and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don't Have To Be Crazy To Believe" (Ballantine Books, 1999).- Additional Crew
- Writer
- Director
The most famous Soviet film-maker since Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky (the son of noted poet Arseniy Tarkovsky) studied music and Arabic in Moscow before enrolling in the Soviet film school VGIK. He shot to international attention with his first feature, Ivan's Childhood (1962), which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. This resulted in high expectations for his second feature Andrei Rublev (1966), which was banned by the Soviet authorities for two years. It was shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival at four o'clock in the morning on the last day, in order to prevent it from winning a prize - but it won one nonetheless, and was eventually distributed abroad partly to enable the authorities to save face. Solaris (1972), had an easier ride, being acclaimed by many in Europe and North America as the Soviet answer to Kubrick's '2001' (though Tarkovsky himself was never too fond of his own film nor Kubrick's), but he ran into official trouble again with Mirror (1975), a dense, personal web of autobiographical memories with a radically innovative plot structure. Stalker (1979) had to be completely reshot on a dramatically reduced budget after an accident in the laboratory destroyed the first version, and after Nostalghia (1983), shot in Italy (with official approval), Tarkovsky defected to Europe. His last film, The Sacrifice (1986) was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman's regular collaborators, and won an almost unprecedented four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. He died of lung cancer at the end of the year. Two years later link=Sergei Parajanov dedicated his film Ashik Kerib to Tarkovsky.- Actress
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Jean Dorothy Seberg was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, to substitute teacher Dorothy Arline (Benson) and pharmacist Edward Waldemar Seberg. Her father was of Swedish descent and her mother was of English and German ancestry.
One month before her 18th birthday, Jean landed the title role in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957) after a much-publicized contest involving some 18,000 hopefuls. The failure of that film and the only moderate success of her next, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), combined to stall Seberg's career, until her role in Jean-Luc Godard's landmark feature, Breathless (1960), brought her renewed international attention. Seberg gave a memorable performance as a schizophrenic in the title role of Robert Rossen's Lilith (1964) opposite Warren Beatty and went on to appear in over 30 films in Hollywood and Europe.
In the late 1960s, Seberg became involved in anti-war politics and was the target of an undercover campaign by the FBI to discredit her because of her association with several members of the Black Panther party. She was found dead under mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1979.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Romy Schneider was born on 23 September 1938 in Vienna, Austria into a family of actors. Making her film debut at the age of 15, her breakthrough came two years later in the very popular trilogy Sissi (1955). Her mother, supervising her daughter's career, immediately approved Romy's participation in Christine (1958), the remake of Max Ophüls's Playing at Love (1933), where Magda Schneider once starred herself. During the shooting, she fell in love with her co-star Alain Delon and eventually moved with him to Paris. At that time, she started her international career collaborating with famous directors such as Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles. After Delon had broken up with her in 1964, she married Harry Meyen shortly after. Although she gave birth to a boy, David-Christopher, their relationship was difficult, so they divorced in 1975. Being unsatisfied with her personal life, she turned to alcohol and drugs, but her cinematic career -especially in France- remained intact. She was the first actress, receiving the new created César Award as "Best Actress" for her role in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975). Three years later, she was awarded again for A Simple Story (1978). After a short marriage to her former secretary Daniel Biasini, being the father of her daughter Sarah Biasini, she suffered the hardest blow of her life when her son was impaled on a fence in 1981. She never managed to recover from this loss and died on 29 May 1982 in Paris. Although it was suggested she committed suicide caused by an overdose of sleeping pills, she was declared to have died from cardiac arrest.- Actor
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Balding, quietly spoken, of slight build and possessed of piercing blue eyes -- often peering out from behind round, steel-rimmed glasses -- Donald Pleasence had the essential physical attributes which make a great screen villain. In the course of his lengthy career, he relished playing the obsessed, the paranoid and the purely evil. Even the Van Helsing-like psychiatrist Sam Loomis in the Halloween (1978) franchise seems only marginally more balanced than his prey. An actor of great intensity, Pleasence excelled on stage as Shakespearean villains. He was an unrelenting prosecutor in Jean Anouilh's "Poor Bitos" and made his theatrical reputation in the title role of the seedy, scheming tramp in Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" (1960). On screen, he gave a perfectly plausible interpretation of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, in The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He was a convincingly devious Thomas Cromwell in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), disturbing in his portrayal of the crazed, bloodthirsty preacher Quint in Will Penny (1967); and as sexually depraved, alcohol-sodden 'Doc' Tydon in the brilliant Aussie outback drama Wake in Fright (1971). And, of course, he was Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (1967). These are some of the films, for which we may remember Pleasence, but there was a great deal more to this fabulous, multi-faceted actor.
Donald Henry Pleasence was born on October 5, 1919 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England, to Alice (Armitage) and Thomas Stanley Pleasence. His family worked on the railway. His grandfather had been a signal man and both his brother and father were station masters. When Donald failed to get a scholarship at RADA, he joined the family occupation working as a clerk at his father's station before becoming station master at Swinton, Yorkshire. While there, he wrote letters to theatre companies, eventually being accepted by one on the island of Jersey in Spring 1939 as an assistant stage manager. On the eve of World War II, he made his theatrical debut in "Wuthering Heights". In 1942, he played Curio in "Twelfth Night", but his career was then interrupted by military service in the RAF. He was shot down over France, incarcerated and tortured in a German POW camp. Once repatriated, Donald returned to the stage in Peter Brook's 1946 London production of "The Brothers Karamazov" with Alec Guinness although he missed the opening due to measles, followed by a stint on Broadway with Laurence Olivier's touring company in "Caesar and Cleopatra" and "Anthony and Cleopatra". Upon his return to England, he won critical plaudits for his performance in "Hobson's Choice". In 1952, Donald began his screen career, rather unobtrusively, in small parts. He was only really noticed once having found his métier as dastardly, sneaky Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955). It took several more years, until international recognition came his way: first, through the filmed adaptation of The Guest (1963), and, secondly, with his blind forger in The Great Escape (1963), a role he imbued with added conviction due to his own wartime experience.
Some of his best acting Donald reserved for the small screen. In 1962, the producer of The Twilight Zone (1959), Buck Houghton, brought Donald to the United States ("damn the expense"!) to guest star in the third-season episode "The Changing of the Guard". He was given a mere five days to immerse himself in the part of a gentle school teacher, Professor Ellis Fowler, who, on the eve of Christmas is forcibly retired after fifty-one years of teaching. Devastated, and believing himself a failure who has made no mark on the world, he is about to commit suicide when the school's bell summons him to his classroom. There, he is confronted by the spirits of deceased students who beg him to consider that his lessons have indeed had fundamental effects on their lives, even leading to acts of great heroism. Upon hearing this, Fowler is now content to graciously accept his retirement. Managing to avoid maudlin sentimentality, Donald's performance was intuitive and, arguably, one of the most poignant ever accomplished in a thirty-minute television episode. Once again, against type, he was equally delightful as the mild-mannered Reverend Septimus Harding in Anthony Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles (1982).
Whether eccentric, sinister or given to pathos, Donald Pleasence was always great value for money and his performances have rarely failed to engage.- André René Roussimoff was born in a small farming community in Grenoble, France to Boris and Marian Rouismoff. His parents and four siblings were all of normal size, but André suffered from acromegaly, a hormonal disorder that results when the pituitary gland produces excess growth hormone. As the Giant grew up (very quickly, as he reached the height of 6' 3" by the age of 12) he began to often disagree with his parents. He left home at 14 and obtained a job with a furniture-moving firm and began to play rugby. At 17 he was seen training at a gym by several professional wrestlers. Impressed by his size, they taught him some basic wrestling skills and built a friendship with him. Later, when one of the wrestlers was injured, André stepped in for him. He would wrestle for nearly thirty more years. By his early 20s André had wrestled in Algeria, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, England, Scotland, and most of non-Communist Europe but had not found fame. In 1971 he came to North America under the name Jean Ferre and was mildly popular in Canada. Then he met a New York based booker by the name of Vincent J. McMahon (often incorrectly referred to as "Vince McMahon Sr") who renamed him "Andre the Giant," and billed him as 7' 4" (Andre was really closer to 7'). Soon Andre the Giant became a national sensation and was a much sought after wrestler. In addition he participated in television, movies, and commercials. With his wealth the Giant bought a ranch in Ellerbe, North Carolina where he would live during his rare time off and after he retired from wrestling in 1990. He died while in France after attending his father's funeral. André was cremated and his ashes were spread across his ranch. He is survived by his one daughter.
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Jane Birkin was born on 14 December 1946 in London, England, UK. She was an actress and director, known for Evil Under the Sun (1982), Blow-Up (1966) and Death on the Nile (1978). She was married to John Barry. She died on 16 July 2023 in Paris, France.- Actress
- Music Department
- Soundtrack
Her father was a police lieutenant and imbued in her a military attitude to life. Marlene was known in school for her "bedroom eyes" and her first affairs were at this stage in her life - a professor at the school was terminated. She entered the cabaret scene in 1920s Germany, first as a spectator then as a cabaret singer. In 1923, she married and, although she and Rudolf Sieber lived together only 5 years, they remained married until his death. She was in over a dozen silent films in increasingly important roles. In 1929, she was seen in a Berlin cabaret by Josef von Sternberg and, after a screen test, captured the role of the cabaret singer in The Blue Angel (1930) (and became von Sternberg's lover). With the success of this film, von Sternberg immediately took her to Hollywood, introducing her to the world in Morocco (1930), and signing an agreement to produce all her films. A series of successes followed, and Marlene became the highest paid actress of her time, but her later films in the mid-part of the decade were critical and popular failures. She returned to Europe at the end of the decade, with a series of affairs with former leading men (she had a reputation of romancing her co-stars), as well as other prominent artistic figures. In 1939, an offer came to star with James Stewart in a western and, after initial hesitation, she accepted. The film was Destry Rides Again (1939) - the siren of film could also be a comedienne and a remarkable comeback was reality. She toured extensively for the allied effort in WW II (she had become a United States citizen) and, after the war, limited her cinematic life. But a new career as a singer and performer appeared, with reviews and shows in Las Vegas, touring theatricals, and even Broadway. New success was accompanied by a too close acquaintance with alcohol, until falls in her performance eventually resulted in a compound fracture of the leg. Although the last 13 years of her life were spent in seclusion in her apartment in Paris, with the last 12 years in bed, she had withdrawn only from public life and maintained active telephone and correspondence contact with friends and associates.- Actress
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When people gave Louis Malle credit for making a star of Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows (1958) immediately followed by The Lovers (1958), he would point out that Moreau by that time had already been "recognized as the prime stage actress of her generation." She had made it to the Comédie Française in her 20s. She had appeared in B-movie thrillers with Jean Gabin and Ascenseur was in that genre. The technicians at the film lab went to the producer after seeing the first week of dailies for Ascenseur and said: "You must not let Malle destroy Jeanne Moreau". Malle explained: "She was lit only by the windows of the Champs Elysées. That had never been done. Cameramen would have forced her to wear a lot of make-up and they would put a lot of light on her, because, supposedly, her face was not photogenic". This lack of artifice revealed Moreau's "essential qualities: she could be almost ugly and then ten seconds later she would turn her face and would be incredibly attractive. But she would be herself".
Moreau has told interviewers that the characters she played were not her. But even the most famous film critic of his generation, Roger Ebert, thinks that she is a lot like her most enduring role, Catherine in François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962). Behind those eyes and that enigmatic smile is a woman with a mind. In a review of The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1993) Ebert wrote: "Jeanne Moreau has been a treasure of the movies for 35 years... Here, playing a flamboyant woman who nevertheless keeps her real thoughts closely guarded, she brings about a final scene of poetic justice as perfect as it is unexpected".
Moreau made her debut as a director in Lumiere (1976) -- also writing the script and playing Sarah, an actress the same age as Moreau whose romances are often with directors for the duration of making a film. She made several films with Malle.
Still active in international cinema, Moreau presided over the jury of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Gaspard Ulliel's dream had always been to direct a movie, and after completing his studies at the lycée (French high school), he majored in cinema at the University of Saint-Denis, and began his acting career.
He was born in Paris, to Christine, a stylist and runway show producer, and Serge Ulliel, a fashion designer. One of his first professional performances came when he was twelve, in the TV film Une femme en blanc (1997). During the following years, Ulliel continued working on television and was cast in short films such as Alias (1999). He played a young shepherd who was injured by The Beast in Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), and was then discovered by director Michel Blanc, who offered him a part in Summer Things (2002) which also starred veteran actress Charlotte Rampling. Ulliel then took summer stages at Les Cours Florent and was asked by director André Téchiné to star in Strayed (2003) as Emmanuelle Béart's over. His role as Manech opposite Audrey Tautou in A Very Long Engagement (2004) brought him to stardom. He was nominated thrice for Most Promising Male Newcomer at the César Awards (the equivalent of the Oscars in France) in 2003, 2004 and 2005; he won the last one. Ulliel's lead roles include The Last Day (2004), Jacquou le croquant (2007) and Hannibal Rising (2007), his first major English-language film.
He had a son with his former partner, model and singer Gaëlle Piétri, born in January 2016. They split up in 2020. Gaspard died on 19 January, 2022, in La Tronche, Isère, France, after a skiing accident.- Actress
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Maria Schneider was a French actress. At age 19 she became famous for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Last Tango in Paris (1972), and The Passenger (1975).
As a teenager, she adored films, going to the cinema up to four times a week. She left home at 15 after an argument with her mother and went to Paris, where she made her stage acting debut that same year.
Her film debut was an uncredited role in The Christmas Tree (1969).
In Last Tango in Paris she performed several nude scenes. After the film release she decided never to work nude again.
In early 1976, she abandoned the film set of Caligula and was replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy.
She and Brando remained friends until his death.
Schneider died of breast cancer on 3 February 2011 at age 58.- Actor
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The son of the renowned French sculptor Paul Belmondo, he studied at Conservatoire National Superieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD); after the minor stage performances he made his screen debut in À pied, à cheval et en voiture (1957) but the episodes with his participation were cut before release. However, the breakthrough role in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) made him one of the key figures in the French New Wave. Since mid-60s he completely switched to commercial mainstream pictures and became a big comedy and action star in France. Following the example of Alain Delon he founded his own production company Cerito named after his grandmother's maiden name. In 1989 he was awarded Cesar for his performance in Itinerary of a Spoiled Child (1988) . Recently he returned to stage performing in the Théâtre Marigny, Paris, notably as Edmund Kean or Cyrano de Bergerac. He still appears in the movies but not so often as before preferring mostly dramatic roles. The president of France distinguished him with order of Legion of Honour. Belmondo had three children with his first spouse Elodie Constant: Patricia Belmondo ( who died in a fire in 1993), Florence Belmondo and Paul Belmondo. In 2003, he had another daughter, Stella Belmondo, with his second spouse Natty Belmondo. None of his children became actors though you could have seen his son Paul in an episodic role (the same as his father, at an earlier age) in Itinerary of a Spoiled Child (1988).- Actress
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Claudine Auger, a former Miss France 1st Runner-up (1958), received her dramatic training at the Paris Drama Conservatory and is best known to US / UK audiences as the stunning brunette "Domino" opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond thriller Thunderball (1965), She has kept fairly busy since her Bond days, acting in a number of Italian, French and Spanish films including The Bermuda Triangle (1978), Credo (1983), and La bocca (1991).- Writer
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French director François Truffaut began to assiduously go to the movies at age seven. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who became his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953 Truffaut published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine Truffaut, and some of his friends as passionate as he was, became defenders of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.
The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse; named after Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952). He also directed The Mischief Makers (1957), considered the real first step of his cinematographic work. His other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film, The 400 Blows (1959), was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the year his first daughter, Laura Truffaut, was born.
From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982, with French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness.- Actor
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Andrew Prine, a well-known stage actor also known for military and western dramas, was first seen in Kiss Her Goodbye (1959), then in The Miracle Worker (1962). Prine, who has a Texan-sounding voice, was also well remembered in westerns like Texas Across the River (1966), Generation (1969) and Chisum (1970), which featured his close and well-known friends Christopher George, John Wayne and Richard Jaeckel. Prine next starred in Simon, King of the Witches (1971), One Little Indian (1973), The Centerfold Girls (1974) and Grizzly (1976), which also featured Christopher George and Richard Jaeckel. Prine also wrote his own little dialogue story for Grizzly (1976). During this time, through the '60s and '70s, Prine was married four times but kept his acting career up. Prine later was in The Evil (1978), Amityville II: The Possession (1982), Eliminators (1986), Chill Factor (1989) and Gettysburg (1993), which got Prine a big and great role. Prine is a great veteran actor in Hollywood who will always be remembered. He has also been in over 30 great films and made 79 guest appearances.- Actor
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Born 1930 in Piolenc in south France as son of a wealthy industrialist. Studied law in Aix-en-Provence. Started theatrical acting in 1950, but was regarded untalented at first, until Roger Vadim discovered him for the movies. When the press stalked him 1956 because of rumors of an affair with Brigitte Bardot his partner in ...And God Created Woman (1956), he fled into the army. Ten years later he had his first big success with A Man and a Woman (1966). Since then he has starred in more than 100 movies, with a special talent for the dark characters like murderers or jealous husbands. In his late career he preferred theater to movies.- Actor
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Louis Germain David de Funès de Galarza was born on July 31, 1914, in Courbevoie, France. His father, named Carlos Luis de Funes de Galarza, was a former lawyer of Seville, Spain, who became a diamond cutter. His mother, named Leonor Soto Reguera, was of Spanish and Portugese extraction.
Young Louis de Funès was fond of drawing and piano playing. He dropped out of school and worked various jobs, mostly as a jazz pianist at Pigalle, making his customers laugh every time he made a grimace. He studied acting for one year at the Simon acting school. There he made some useful contacts, including Daniel Gélin among others. During the occupation of Paris in the Second World War, he continued his piano studies at a music school, where he fell in love with a secretary, named Jeanne de Maupassant, a grand-niece of writer Guy de Maupassant. She had fallen in love with "the young man who played jazz like god"; they married in 1943, and had two sons born in 1944 and 1949. Funès continued playing piano at clubs, knowing there wasn't much call for a short, balding, skinny actor. His wife and Daniel Gelin encouraged him until he managed to overcome his rejection. He made his film debut in 1945, at the age of 31, and went on playing about one hundred film roles in the next twenty years.
Louis de Funès shot to international fame in the 1960's after his roles in such slapstick comedies as The Gendarme of Saint-Tropez (1964) and the Fantomas (1964) trilogy. He brilliantly portrayed a funny French policeman, whose hilarious hyperactivity, uncontrolled anger, and sardonic laughter produced a highly comic effect. Funès was voted the most favorite actor in France in 1968, and remained very popular in Europe during the 1970's. He also continued to play on stage during his career as a film star, and was acclaimed for his stage works in classic French theatre. Funès was instrumental in making film adaptations of such theatre plays as 'Oscar continues' and the Molière's 'The Miser', among other plays.
Nicknamed "the man with the forty faces per minute", Louis de Funès played bit parts in over eighty films, before he got his first leading roles, eventually becoming the leading French comedian. He co-starred with the major French actors of the time, including Jean Marais and Mylène Demongeot in the Fantomas trilogy, and also Jean Gabin, Fernandel, Bourvil, Coluche, Annie Girardot, and Yves Montand. Funès's collaboration with director Gérard Oury produced a memorable tandem of Funès-Bourvil. He also worked with Jean Girault in the famous 'Gendarmes' series. In a departure from the Gendarme image, Funès collaborated with Claude Zidi, who wrote for him a new character full of nuances and frankness in The Wing or The Thigh? (1976), which is arguably the best of his roles.
Funès played over 130 roles in film and over 100 roles on stage. From 1943-1983 Louis de Funès was married to Jeanne Barthelemy de Maupassant. Their son, Olivier De Funès , had a brief acting career before becoming a pilot with Air France, his other son, named Patrick de Funès, became a medical doctor. Louis de Funès was also a rose grower, a variety of roses has been named the "Louis de Funès rose" after him. He died of a heart attack and complications of a stroke on January 27, 1983, in Nantes, France. He was laid to rest in the Cimetière du Cellier, and a monument of him was erected in the rose-garden of his wife's castle.- Actor
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Marcello Mastroianni was born in Fontana Liri, Italy in 1924, but soon his family moved to Turin and then Rome. During WW2 he was sent to a German prison camp, but he managed to escape and hide in Venice. He debuted in films as an extra in Marionette (1939), then started working for the Italian department of "Eagle Lion Films" in Rome and joined a drama club, where he was discovered by director Luchino Visconti. In 1957 Visconti gave him the starring part in his Fyodor Dostoevsky adaptation White Nights (1957) and in 1958 he was fine as a little thief in Mario Monicelli's comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). But his real breakthrough came in 1960, when Federico Fellini cast him as an attractive, weary-eyed journalist of the Rome jet-set in La Dolce Vita (1960); that film was the genesis of his "Latin lover" persona, which Mastroianni himself often denied by accepting parts of passive and sensitive men. He would again work with Fellini in several major films, like the exquisite 8½ (1963) (as a movie director who finds himself at a point of crisis) and the touching Ginger & Fred (1986) (as an old entertainer who appears in a TV show). He also appeared as a tired novelist with marital problems in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), as an impotent young man in Mauro Bolognini's Bell' Antonio (1960) , as an exiled prince in John Boorman's Leo the Last (1970), as a traitor in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Allonsanfan (1974) and as a sensitive homosexual in love with a housewife in Ettore Scola's A Special Day (1977). He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times, for Divorce Italian Style (1961), A Special Day (1977), and Oci ciornie (1987). During the last decade of his life he worked with directors, like Theodoros Angelopoulos, Bertrand Blier and Raúl Ruiz, who gave him three excellent parts in Three Lives and Only One Death (1996). He died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.- Writer
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Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 30. Since then he has made many movies and has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Iranian film. He is also a major figure in the arts world, and has had numerous gallery exhibitions of his photography, short films and poetry. He is an iconic figure for what he has done, and he has achieved it all by believing in the arts and the creativity of his mind.- The face of Simone Signoret on the Paris Metro movie posters in March 1982 looked even older than her 61 years. She was still a box-office draw, but the film L'étoile du Nord (1982) would be her last theatrical release; she played the landlady. Signoret had a long film apprenticeship during World War II, mostly as an extra and occasionally getting to speak a single line. She worked without an official permit during the Nazi occupation of France because her father, who had fled to England, was Jewish. Working almost all the time, she made enough as an extra to support her mother and three younger brothers. Her breakthrough to international stardom came when she was 38 with the British film Room at the Top (1958). Her Alice Aisgill, an unhappily-married woman who hopes she has found true love, radiated real warmth in all of her scenes--not just the bedroom scenes. She was the same woman as Dedee, a prostitute who finds true love in Dédée d'Anvers (1948), a film directed by Signoret's first husband, Yves Allégret, a decade earlier. Hollywood beckoned throughout the 1950s, but both Signoret and her second husband, Yves Montand, were refused visas to enter the United States; their progressive political activities did not sit well with the ultra-conservative McCarthy-era mentality that gripped the US at the time. They got visas in 1960 so Montand, a singer, could perform in New York and San Francisco. They were in Los Angeles in March 1960 when Signoret received the Oscar for best actress and stayed on so Montand could play opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love (1960). The Signoret film that is shown most often on TV and got a theatrical re-release in 1995, four decades after it was made is the French thriller Diabolique (1955). The chilly character Signoret plays is proof of her acting ability. More typical of her person is the countess in Ship of Fools (1965), a film that also starred Vivien Leigh ,which more than doubled its chances of being in a video-store or library film collection.
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Laurent Cantet was born on 11 April 1961 in Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France. He was a director and writer, known for The Class (2008), Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001). He was married to Isabelle Coursin. He died on 25 April 2024 in Paris, France.- Actress
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Delphine was born in Beirut on the 10th April 1932 into an intellectual Protestant family. Her Alsatian father, Henri Seyrig, was the director of the Archaeological Institute and later France's cultural attaché in New York during World War Two. Her Swiss mother, Hermine De Saussure, was an adept of Rousseau's theories, a female sailing pioneer and the niece of the universally acclaimed linguist and semiologist, Ferdinand De Saussure. Delphine also had a brother, Francis Seyrig, who would go on to become a successful composer. At the end of the war, the family relocated to Paris, although Delphine's adolescence was to be spent between her country, Greece and New York. Never a good student, she decided to quit school at age 17 to pursue a stage career. Her father gave her his approval on the condition that she would have done this with seriousness and dedication. Delphine took courses of Dramatic Arts with some illustrious teachers such as Roger Blin, Pierre Bertin and Tania Balachova. Some of her fellow students included Jean-Louis Trintignant, Michael Lonsdale, Laurent Terzieff, Bernard Fresson, Stéphane Audran, Daniel Emilfork and Antoine Vitez. Her stage debut came in 1952 in a production of Louis Ducreux's musical "L'Amour en Papier", followed by roles in "Le Jardin du Roi" (Pierre Devaux) and in Jean Giraudoux's "Tessa, la nymphe au Coeur fidèle". Stage legend Jean Dasté was the first director to offer her a couple of parts that would truly showcase her talents: Ariel in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and Chérubin in Beaumarchais' "The Marriage of Figaro". He also had her take the title role in a production of Giraudoux's "Ondine" from Odile Versois, who had gone to England to shoot an Ealing movie. Delphine's performance was greeted with enormous critical approval. The young actress stayed in Europe for a couple years more, starring in a production of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" in Paris, making two guest appearances in Sherlock Holmes (1954) (which was entirely shot in France) and trying to enter the TNP (People's National Theatre). She actually wasn't admitted because the poetic, melodious voice that would become her signature mark was deemed too strange. In 1956, Delphine decided to sail for America along with her husband Jack Youngerman (a painter she had married in Paris) and son Duncan.
Delphine tried to enter the Actor's studio, but, just like in the case of many of Hollywood's finest actors, she failed the admittance test. She would still spend three years as an observer (also attending Lee Strasberg's classes) and this minor mishap didn't prevent her from going on with her stage career anyway, as she did theatre work in Connecticut and appeared in an off-Broadway production of Pirandello's "Henry IV" opposite Burgess Meredith and Alida Valli. Legend wants that the show was such a flop that the producer burned down the set designs. One year later, a single meeting would change the young actress' life forever. Delphine was starring in a production of Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" when one very day she was approached by a very enthusiast spectator. It was the great director Alain Resnais, fresh of the huge personal triumph he had scored with his masterwork, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Resnais was now trying to do a movie about the pulp magazine character Harry Dickson (an American version of Sherlock Holmes) and thought that Delphine could have played the role of the detective's nemesis, Georgette Cuvelier/The Spider. The project would never see the light of the day, but this meeting would soon lead to the genesis of an immortal cinematic partnership. Delphine's first feature film was also done the same year: it was the manifesto of the Beat Generation, the innovative Pull My Daisy (1959). The 30 minutes film was written and narrated by Jack Kerouac and featured an almost entirely non-professional cast including poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky along with painter Larry Rivers. Delphine played Rivers' wife in this well-done and interesting curio, an appropriate starting point to a very intriguing and alternative career. In 1960 she landed the role of Cara Williams and Harry Morgan's French neighbour in a new sitcom, Pete and Gladys (1960). Although she left the show after only three episodes, it is interesting to see her interact with the likes of Williams, Morgan and Cesar Romero, since they seem to belong to such different worlds. This was going to be the end of Delphine's journey in the States, although she would keep very fond memories of this period, stating in 1969 that she didn't consider herself "particularly French, but American in equal measure". In 1961 she would take her native France by storm.
Resnais had now been approached by writer Alain Robbe-Grillet- one of the main creators of the "Nouveau Roman" genre- to direct a movie based upon his script "L'anneé dernière". Having been awed by the recent Vertigo (1958), Robbe-Grillet was nourishing the hope that Kim Novak could have possibly played the mysterious female protagonist of the upcoming adaptation of his novel. Luckily, Resnais had different plans. Delphine was back in France for a holiday when the director offered her the role of the enigmatic lady nicknamed A. in his latest movie, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Delphine accepted and finally took her rightful place in film history. The plot of the movie is apparently simple: in a baroque-looking castle, X. (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince the reclusive A. that they had an affair the previous year. The movie has been interpreted in many different ways: a ghost story, a sci-fi story, an example of meta-theatre, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a retelling of Pygmalion and the Statue and plenty more. Resnais proved to be very partial to Delphine and didn't want her to just stand there like a motionless mannequin like the entire supporting cast did. As X. begins to instill or awake some feelings and memories into A., Delphine subtly hints at a change happening inside the character, managing to alternatively project an image of innocence and desire in a brilliant way. With her stunning, sphinx-like beauty being particularly highlighted by raven-black hair (Resnais wanted her to look like Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box (1929)) and her warm, seductive voice completing the magical charm of the character, Delphine made A. her most iconic-looking creation and got immediately welcomed to the club of the greatest actresses of France. The movie itself received the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and remains Resnais' masterpiece, not to mention possibly the greatest son of the French New Wave. The gothic organ music provided by Delphine's brother Francis also played an important role in the success of "Marienbad".
Like he had done a couple years before with Emmanuelle Riva, Resnais had made another invaluable gift to French cinema and one would have expected to see Delphine immediately racking a dozen film projects after "Marienbad", but for the time being she preferred to return to her first love, the theatre. She always wished to avoid the perils of celebrity and started a very turbulent relationship with reporters. She made this statement on the subject: "There is nothing to say about an actor or an actress. You just need to go and see them, that's all". She also hated the fact that, after "Marienbad", many journalists had paraphrased many of her statements in order to get meatier articles or entirely made up stories about her. Her next film project came in 1963 when she was reunited with Resnais for the superb Muriel (1963). Wearing some makeup that made her look plainer and older, Delphine gave a first sample of her chameleon-like abilities and one of her most spectacular performances ever as Hélène Aughain, an apparently absent-minded, but actually very tragic antique shop dealer who tries to reshape her squalid present in order to get even with a past made of shame and humiliation. Providing her character with a clumsy walk and an odd behavior that looks amusing on the surface, she delegated her subtlest facial expressions to hint at Hélène's grief and sense of dissatisfaction, creating a very pathetic and moving figure in the process. This incredible achievement was awarded with a Volpi cup at Venice Film Festival. Delphine felt very proud for herself and for Resnais. "Muriel" turned out to be one of the director's most divisive works, with some people considering it his finest film and others dismissing it as a product below his standard. The movie's American reception was unfortunately disastrous: having been released in New York disguised as an "even more mysterious sequel" to Marienbad, it stayed in theaters for five days only. The same year, Delphine did a TV movie called Le troisième concerto (1963) which marked her first collaboration with Marcel Cravenne. Her performance as a pianist who's seemingly losing her mind scored big with both critics and audience and made her much more popular with the French public than two rather inaccessible movies such as "Marienbad" and "Muriel" could ever do. Delphine never considered herself a star though, stating that "a star is like a racing horse a producer can place money on" and that she wasn't anything like that. In the following years she kept doing remarkable stage work. 1964 saw her first collaboration with Samuel Beckett: she invited the great author at her place in Place Des Vosges where she rehearsed for the role of the Lover in the first French production of "Play" along with Michael Lonsdale as the Husband and Eléonore Hirt as the Wife. The three of them would then bring the show to the stage and star in a film version in 1966. Delphine would team up with Beckett on other occasions in the future and even more frequently with Lonsdale, her co-star in several films and stage productions. For two consecutive times she won the "Prix Du Syndicat de la Critique" (the most ancient and illustrious award given by French theatre critics) for Best Actress: in 1967 (1966/1967 season) for her performances in "Next Time I'll Sing to You" and "To Find Oneself" and in 1969 (1968/1969 season) for her work in L'Aide-mémoire. In 1966 she did a cameo in the surreal, Monty Pythonesque Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), which was written and directed by William Klein (her friend of about 20 years) and starred Sami Frey, who would be her partner for her entire life after her separation from Youngerman. In 1967, she had a few exquisitely acted scenes (all shot in one day and a half) with Dirk Bogarde in Joseph Losey's excellent Accident (1967). Her appearance as Bogarde's old flame seemed to echo and pay homage to "Marienbad", from the almost illusory touch of the whole sequence to the suggestive use of music by the great John Dankworth. Delphine totally enjoyed to work with Losey, although their relationship would drastically change by the time of their next adventure together. The same year would also see the release of the spellbinding The Music (1967), her first filmed collaboration with Marguerite Duras. The author had always worshiped Delphine for her exceptional screen presence and for possessing the aura of a classic goddess of the Golden Age of Hollywood. She said about her: "When Delphine Seyrig moves into the camera's field, there's a flicker of Garbo and Clara Bow and we look to see if Cary Grant is at her side". She also loved her sexy voice, stating that she always sounded like "she had just sucked a sweet fruit and her mouth was still moist" and would go on to call her "the greatest actress in France and possibly in the entire world". "La Musica" isn't the most remembered Seyrig-Duras collaboration, but nevertheless occupies a special place in history as the beginning of a beautiful friendship between two artists that would become strictly associated with each other for eternity. Delphine's performance won her the "Étoile de Cristal" (the top film award given in France by the "Académie Française" between 1955 and 1975 and later replaced by the César). The actress later made a glorious Hedda Gabler for French television, although she never much enjoyed to do work for this kind of medium. She often complained about the poverty of means and little professionalism of French TV and declined on several occasions the possibility to play the role of Mme De Mortsauf in an adaptation of Balzac's "Le lys dans la vallée". In 1968 she found one of her most famous and celebrated roles in François Truffaut's latest installment of the Antoine Doinel saga, Stolen Kisses (1968), which overall qualifies as one of her most "traditional" career choices. Delphine's new divine creature was Fabienne Tabard, the breathtakingly beautiful wife of an obnoxious shoe store owner (Michael Lonsdale) and the latest object of Antoine's attention. It is very interesting that, in the movie, Antoine reads a copy of "Le lys dans la vallée" and compares Fabienne to the novel's heroine. At one point, Delphine had almost agreed to appear in the TV production on the condition that Jean-Pierre Léaud would have played the leading male role. She later inquired with Truffaut if he knew about this by the time he had written the script, but he swore that it was just a coincidence. In 1969 she declined the leading female role in The Swimming Pool (1969) because she didn't see anything interesting about it; this despite strong soliciting from her close friend Jean Rochefort (whom she nicknamed "Mon petit Jeannot"). At the time, it was considered almost inconceivable to decline the chance of appearing in an Alain Delon movie, but Delphine really valued the power of saying "no" and the part went to Romy Schneider instead. It consequently came of great surprise when, the same year, she accepted the role of Marie-Madeleine in William Klein's rather dated, but somewhat charming Mr. Freedom (1968), where she played most of her scenes semi-naked. But Delphine, as usual, had her valid reasons to appear in this strong satire of American Imperialism. Klein's comic strip adaptation isn't without its enjoyable moments (like a scene where the Americans use a map to indicate the Latin dictatorships as the civilized, democratic world), but goes on for too long and suffers every time Delphine disappears from the screen. Still, it remains a must for Seyrig fans, as you'd never expect to see the most intellectual of actresses having a martial arts fight with the gigantic John Abbey and giving a performance of pure comic genius in the tradition of Kay Kendall. The same year she also had a cameo as the Prostitute in Luis Buñuel's masterful The Milky Way (1969). Delphine read the entire script, but eventually regretted that she hadn't watched Alain Cuny playing his scene, because, in that case, she would have played her own very differently and brought the movie to full circle, something she thought she hadn't done. She promised Buñuel to do better on the next occasion they would have worked together.
In 1970, Delphine eventually agreed to appear in Le lys dans la vallée (1970) under the direction of Marcel Cravenne, although the male protagonist wasn't played by Léaud, but by Richard Leduc. It turned out to be one of the best ever adaptations of a French classic and her performance was titanic. She then played the Lilac Fairy in Jacques Demy's lovely musical Donkey Skin (1970), which starred a young Catherine Deneuve in the title role, but boosted a superlative supporting cast including Jacques Perrin, Micheline Presle, Sacha Pitoëff and Jean Marais (who sort of provided a link with Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946)). Despite all this profusion of talent, Delphine effortlessly stole the movie with her sassy smile, impeccable comedic timing and multi-colored wardrobe. Although she would go on to sing on future occasions, Demy preferred to have her musical number dubbed by Christiane Legrand. The following year, she won a new multitude of male admirers when she arguably played the sexiest and most memorable female vampire in film history in the underrated psychological horror Daughters of Darkness (1971). The choice of a niche actress like Delphine to play the lesbian, Dietrichesque Countess Bathory is considered one of the main factors that sets Harry Kümel's movie apart from the coeval products made by the likes of Jesús Franco or Jean Rollin. To see another horror movie highlighted by the presence of an unforgettable female vampire in Seyrig style, one will have to wait for the similar casting of the splendid Nina Hoss in the auteur effort We Are the Night (2010). Cravenne's Tartuffe (1971) was a delicious "Jeu à Deux" between Delphine and the immense Michel Bouquet. In 1972, Delphine would add another immortal title to her filmography, as she was cast in Luis Buñuel's surrealist masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). As the adulterous Simone Thévenot, always wearing a sanctimoniously polite smile, she managed to give the star turn in a flawless cast: Fernando Rey made his Rafael Acosta deliciously nasty behind his cover of unflappability, Paul Frankeur was hilariously obtuse as M.Thévenot, Jean-Pierre Cassel suitably ambiguous as M.Sénéchal, Julien Bertheau looked charmingly sinister as Mons.Dufour, Bulle Ogier got to show her formidable gifts for physical comedy as Florence and the role of Alice Sénéchal, a woman who gets annoyed at not getting coffee while a man has just confessed to have murdered his father, proved for once the perfect fit for the coldest and least emotional of actresses, Stéphane Audran. The movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The next year, Delphine appeared in a couple of star-studded productions: she gave a brief, but memorably moving performance in Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973) as a French woman who makes the fatal mistake of falling for Edward Fox's ruthless killer. People's memories of the movie are often associated with her scenes. She also appeared in Losey's disappointing A Doll's House (1973) opposite a badly miscast Jane Fonda as Nora. The two actresses didn't get along with the director as they both thought his vision of the story to be deeply misogynist. Many key dialogues were unskillfully butchered for the adaptation, diminishing the depth of the characters and the end result was consequently cold, although the movie has its redeeming features. The brilliant David Warner arguably remains the definitive screen Torvald and Delphine is typically impeccable in the fine role of Kristine, although one can't help but think that an accomplished Ibsenian actress like her should have played Nora in the first place. Although Losey wasn't in speaking terms with her any longer by the time the shooting ended, Delphine befriended Jane as they shared a lot of ideals and causes. Delphine Seyrig was of course a vocal feminist, although she didn't consider herself a militant: she actually believed that women should have already known their rights by then and that she didn't have to cause any consciousness raising in them. She would go on to work with more and more female directors shortly after, considering also that she had now begun to love cinema as much as theatre. In 1974 she appeared in a stage production of "La Cheuvachée sur le lac de Constance" because she dearly desired to act opposite the wonderful Jeanne Moreau, but from that moment on, most of her energies were saved for film work. She also grew more and more radical in picking up her projects: Le journal d'un suicidé (1972), Dites-le avec des fleurs (1974) and Der letzte Schrei (1975) certainly qualify as some of her oddest features, not to mention the most difficult to watch. Le cri du coeur (1974), although flawed by an inept performance by Stéphane Audran, was slightly more interesting: the director capitalized on Delphine's Marienbad image once again, casting her as a mysterious woman the crippled young protagonist gets sexually obsessed with. She made another relatively "ordinary" pick by playing villainous in Don Siegel's remarkable spy thriller The Black Windmill (1974) alongside stellar performers like Michael Caine, Donald Pleasence, John Vernon and Janet Suzman.
The following year, Delphine had two first rate roles in Le jardin qui bascule (1975) and in Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse (1975) (where her younger self was played, quite fittingly, by an already prodigious Isabelle Huppert). But 1975 wasn't over for Delphine as the thespian would round off the year with two of her most amazing achievements. The Seyrig/Duras team did finally spring into action again with the memorable India Song (1975), another movie which lived and died entirely on Delphine's intense face. Laure Adler wrote these pertinent words in her biography of Duras: "In India Song we see nothing of Calcutta, all we see is a woman dancing in the drawing room of the French embassy and that is enough, for Delphine fills the screen". Coming next was what many people consider the actress' most monumental personal achievement: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). It has become a common saying that, when you have a great interest in an actor, you could watch him/her reading the phone book. Seyrig fans can experiment it almost literally in Chantal Akerman's three hour minimalist masterpiece, which meticulously follows the daily routine of widowed housewife Jeanne. Akerman chose Delphine "because she brought with her all the roles of mythical woman that she played until now. The woman in Marienbad, The woman in India Song". The movie can be considered a filmed example of "Nouveau Roman": every moment of Jeanne's day is presented almost real-time -from the act of peeling potatoes or washing dishes- and every gesture has a precise meaning, like Jeanne's incapacity of putting her life together being expressed by her inability of making a decent coffee or put buttons back on a shirt. The movie is also of course a feminist declaration: Jeanne regularly resorts to prostitution to make a living, which (according to Akerman) symbolizes that, even after the death of her husband, she's still dependant of him and always needs to have a male figure enter her life in his place. Her declaration of independence is expressed at the end of the movie through the murder of one of her clients. Delphine's approach to the role was as natural as possible and she completely disappeared into it, giving a hypnotic performance that keeps the viewer glued to his chair and prevents him to feel the sense of boredom every actress short of extraordinary would have induced. It's considered one of the greatest examples of acting ever recorded by a camera and possibly the definitive testament to Delphine's abilities. By now she was being referred as France's greatest actress with the same frequency Michel Piccoli was called the greatest actor. 1976 saw the the Césars replacing the "Étoiles de Cristal" and Delphine was nominated for "India Song", but she lost to Romy Schneider for her work in That Most Important Thing: Love (1975) by Andrzej Zulawski. The same year also saw her getting behind the camera as she directed Scum Manifesto (1976), a short where she read the Valerie Solanas text by the same name. She also starred in Duras' new version of "India Song", Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (1976) (where the setting was changed to the desert) and headlined the cast of Mario Monicelli's Caro Michele (1976). In 1977 she traveled to the UK to shoot an episode of BBC Play of the Month (1965). She stated her great admiration for British TV as opposed to French TV, congratulating BBC for its higher production values and for its major respect for the material it used to produce. Thinking retrospectively about the whole thing, these sentiments seem rather misplaced, since BBC erased tons of programs from existence in order to make room in the storage and for other reasons, but fortunately "The Ambassadors" wasn't part of the slaughter. Like Henry James's story, the cast featured some veritable cultural ambassadors as three different nations offered one of their most talented thespians ever: Paul Scofield represented England, Lee Remick represented United States and Delphine represented France as Madame De Vionnet. Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) marked her final and most forgettable film collaboration with Duras. In Faces of Love (1977), she played the drug-addicted ex-wife of a director (a typically outstanding Jean-Louis Trintignant) who summons her along with two other actresses to shoot a film version of "The Three Sisters". She was again nominated for a César, but the sentimentality factor played in favor of Simone Signoret's performance in Moshé Mizrahi's award-friendly Madame Rosa (1977), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film two months later. Mizrahi later cast both actresses in his subsequent feature, I Sent a Letter to My Love (1980), also starring Jean Rochefort. This bittersweet feature proved much better than the director's previous work: Signoret and Rochefort gave great performances, but, once again, Delphine was best in show as a naive, hare-brained woman so much different from her usual characters and gave another confirmation of her phenomenal range. She was nominated for another César in the supporting actress category, but lost to Nathalie Baye for Every Man for Himself (1980). It's ironic that, despite being considered the nation's top actress by so many people, Delphine never won a César. One theory is that she had alienated many voters (particularly the older ones) by often dismissing 50's French cinema and regularly comparing French actors unfavorably to American ones, just like many New Wave authors (Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette) had done back in the days when they worked as critics for the "Cahiérs Du Cinema" and none of them ever won a César either (or at least not a competitive one). This along with having made many enemies because of her vocally feminist attitude of course. She once stated herself that many people in France probably disliked her because she was always saying what she thought.
In the 80's, Delphine appeared in three stage plays that were later filmed: La Bête dans la Jungle (a Duras adaptation of the Henry James novel), "Letters Home" (about the poet Sylvia Plath) and "Sarah et le cri de la langouste" (where she played the legendary Sarah Bernhardt). She scored a particular success with the latter and won the "Prix Du Syndicat de la Critique" for a record third time, more than any other actress (Michel Bouquet is her male counterpart with three Best Actor wins). In 1981, she directed a feminist documentary, Sois belle et tais-toi! (1981), where she interviewed many actresses, including her friend Jane Fonda, about their role (sometimes purely decorative) in the male-dominated film industry. In 1982 she co-founded the Simone De Beauvoir audiovisual centre along with Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder. A final collaboration with Chantal Akerman, the innovative musical Golden Eighties (1986), allowed her to do what she couldn't do in "Peau d'âne" and give a very moving rendition of a beautiful song. Avant-garde German director Ulrike Ottinger provided Delphine with some unforgettable and appropriately weird roles in three of her features: multiple characters in Freak Orlando (1981), the only female incarnation of Dr.Mabuse in Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) (opposite Veruschka von Lehndorff, playing the title role 'en travesti') and Lady Windermere in Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989). She gave a final, stunning TV performance in Une saison de feuilles (1989) as an actress suffering from Alzheimer's disease and won a 7 d'or (a French Emmy) for it. Her mature turn as a woman who's reaching the end of the line looks particularly poignant now, as it has the bitter taste of a tear-eyed farewell. A woman of extraordinary courage, Delphine had been secretly battling lung cancer (she had always been a chain smoker) for a few years, but, because of her supreme professionalism, she had never neglected a work commitment because of that. Only her closest friends knew. It became evident that there was no hope left when, in September 1990, she had do withdraw her participation from a production of Peter Shaffer's "Lettice and Lovage" with Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud's theatre company. One month later she tragically lost her battle with cancer and died in hospital, leaving an unbridgeable void in the acting world and in the lives of many. Tributes flew in torrents, with Jean-Claude Brialy hosting a particularly touching memorial where Jeanne Moreau read some very heartfelt phrases come from the pen of Marguerite Duras to honour the memory of her muse. In the decade following Delphine's death, many of her features unfortunately didn't prove to have much staying power -being so unique and destined to a very selected and elitist audience- and plenty of people began to forget about the actress. Delphine's good friend, director Jacqueline Veuve, thought this unacceptable and she saw to do something about it, shooting a documentary called Delphine Seyrig, portrait d'une comète (2000), which premiered at Locarno film festival. This partially helped to renew the actress' cult and to expand it to several other followers. Similar retrospectives at the Modern Art Museum in New York and at the La Rochelle Film Festival hopefully served the same purpose as well. One can also hope that the French Academy (Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma) would start to make amends for past sins by awarding Delphine a posthumous César: since the immortal Jean Gabin received one in 1987, who could possibly make a likelier pair with him?- Actor
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Tall, bearded, heavy-set Anglo-French character actor, best known internationally for playing Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel in The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Bond villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker (1979). The son of an English army officer (Edward Lonsdale-Crouch) and a Franco-Irish mother (Simone Béraud), he was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in England. The family moved to Morocco in 1939 where Edward found work in the fertilizer trade (he was later imprisoned by the Vichy government for political reasons). Michael returned to France in 1947 where he met actor/director Roger Blin who awakened his interest in the dramatic arts. Following acting studies, Michael made his theatrical debut at 24 and appeared on screen for the first time a year later, for much of his career billed as 'Michel' Lonsdale. Having toiled for over a decade in smallish supporting roles, he received his first major critical acclaim in two films by François Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Stolen Kisses (1968)). Though primarily active in French cinema, the bilingual Lonsdale made occasional (but often memorable) forays into English-language productions, his first as a reporter in Fred Zinnemann's Behold a Pale Horse (1964). Subsequent parts have included a titled landowner who sets in motion the Caravan to Vaccares (1974), a CIA agent in Enigma (1982) and a Swiss banker in The Holcroft Covenant (1985). James Ivory cast him in two of his films consecutively as a French delegate in The Remains of the Day (1993) and as King Louis XVI in Jefferson in Paris (1995). Lonsdale also had a prominent role as The Abbot who commissions the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) to investigate the murder of a monk in Jean-Jacques Annaud's Italian-German-French co-production of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose (1986) . By and large, it is for his powerhouse performance as Roger Moore's megalomaniacal antagonist Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker for which Lonsdale is likely to be most remembered. He received a BAFTA nomination for his role in The Day of the Jackal but only achieved major acting honors in 2011, winning a César Award as best supporting actor for Of Gods and Men (2010).
Lonsdale's career could well be described as eclectic. In 1972, he co-founded (with French composer Michel Puig) the Théâtre musical des Ulis, a musical theater company which was subsidised by the French government. The soft-spoken actor also lent his voice to radio recordings and audio books. He had a reputation as a painter of some renown and authored or co-authored more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction.- Director
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Admirers have always had difficulty explaining Éric Rohmer's "Je ne sais quoi." Part of the challenge stems from the fact that, despite his place in French Nouvelle Vague (i.e., New Wave), his work is unlike that of his colleagues. While this may be due to the auteur's unwillingness to conform, some have argued convincingly that, in truth, he has remained more faithful to the original ideals of the movement than have his peers. Additionally, plot is not his foremost concern. It is the thoughts and emotions of his characters that are essential to Rohmer, and, just as one's own states of being are hard to define, so is the internal life of his art. Thus, rather than speaking of it in specific terms, fans often use such modifiers as "subtle," "witty," "delicious" and "enigmatic." In an interview with Dennis Hopper, Quentin Tarantino echoed what nearly every aficionado has uttered: "You have to see one of [his movies], and if you kind of like that one, then you should see his other ones, but you need to see one to see if you like it."
Detractors have no problem in expressing their displeasure. They use such phrases as "tedious like a classroom play," "arty and tiresome" and "donnishly talky." Gene Hackman, as jaded detective Harry Moseby in Night Moves (1975), delivered a now famous line that sums up these feelings: "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Undeniably, his excruciatingly slow pace and apathetic, self-absorbed characters are hallmarks, and, at times, even his greatest supporters have made trenchant remarks in this regard. Said critic Pauline Kael, "Seriocomic triviality has become Rohmer's specialty. His sensibility would be easier to take if he'd stop directing to a metronome." In that his proponents will quote attacks on him, indeed Rohmer may be alone among directors. They revel in the fact that "nothing of consequence" happens in his pictures. They are mesmerized by the dense blocks of high-brow chatter. They delight in the predictability of his aesthetic. Above all, however, they are touched by the honesty of a man who, uncompromisingly, lays bear the human soul and "life as such."
Who is Eric Rohmer? Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer on December 1, 1920 in Nancy, a small city in Lorraine, he relocated to Paris and became a literature teacher and newspaper reporter. In 1946, under the pen name Gilbert Cordier, he published his only novel, "Elizabeth". Soon after, his interest began to shift toward criticism, and he began frequenting Cinémathèque Français (founded by archivist Henri Langlois) along with soon-to-be New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. It was at this time that he adopted his pseudonym, an amalgam of the names of actor/director Erich von Stroheim and novelist Sax Rohmer (author of the Fu Manchu series.) His first film, Journal d'un scélérat (1950), was shot the same year that he founded "Gazette du Cinema" along with Godard and Rivette. The next year, Rohmer joined seminal critic André Bazin at "Cahiers du Cinema", where he served as editor-in-chief from 1956 to 1963. As Cahiers was an influential publication, it not only gave him a platform from which to preach New Wave philosophy, but it enabled him to propose revisionist ideas on Hollywood. An example of the latter was "Hitchcock, The First Forty-Four Films", a book on which he collaborated with Chabrol that spoke of Alfred Hitchcock in highly favorable terms.
Rohmer's early forays into direction met with limited success. By 1958, he had completed five shorts, but his sole attempt at feature length, a version of La Comtesse de Ségur's "Les Petites filles modèles", was left unfinished. With Sign of the Lion (1962), he made his feature debut, although it was a decade before he achieved recognition. In the interim, he turned out eleven projects, including three of his "Six contes moraux" (i.e., moral tales), films devoted to examining the inner states of people in the throes of temptation. The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963) and Suzanne's Career (1963) are unremarkable black-and-white pictures that best function as blueprints for his later output. They also mark the beginning of a business partnership with Barbet Schroeder, who starred in the former of the two. The Collector (1967), his first major effort in color, has been mistaken for a Lolita movie; on a deeper plane, it questions the manner in which one collects or rejects experience. Rohmer's first "hit" was My Night at Maud's (1969), which was nominated for two Oscars and won several international awards. It continues to be his best-known work. In it, on the eve of a proclaiming his love to Francoise, his future wife, the narrator spends a night with a pretty divorcée named Maud. Along with a friend, the two have a discussion on life, religion and Pascal's wager (i.e., the necessity of risking all on the only bet that can win.) Left alone with the sensual Maud, the narrator is forced to test his principles. The final parts in the series, Claire's Knee (1970) and Love in the Afternoon (1972) are mid-life crisis tales that cleverly reiterate the notion of self-restraint as the path to salvation.
"Comedies et Proverbs," Rohmer's second cycle, deals with deception. The Aviator's Wife (1981) is the story a naïve student who suspects his girlfriend of infidelity. In stalking her ex-lover and ultimately confronting her, we discover the levels on which he is deceiving himself. Another masterpiece is Pauline at the Beach (1983), a seaside film about adolescents' coming-of-age and the childish antics of their adult chaperones. Of the remaining installments, The Green Ray (1986) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) are the most appealing. The director's last series is known as "Contes des quatre saisons" (i.e., Tales of the Four Seasons), which too presents the dysfunctional relationships of eccentrics. In place of the social games of "Comedies et Proverbs", though, this cycle explores the lives of the emotionally isolated. A Tale of Springtime (1990) and A Tale of Winter (1992) are the more inventive pieces, the latter revisiting Ma Nuit chez Maud's "wager." Just as his oeuvre retraces itself thematically, Rohmer populates it with actors who appear and reappear in unusual ways. The final tale, Autumn Tale (1998), brings together his favorite actresses, Marie Rivière and Béatrice Romand. Like "hiver," it hearkens back to a prior project, A Good Marriage (1982), in examining Romand's quest to find a husband.
Since 1976, Rohmer has made various non-serial releases. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) and Rendez-vous in Paris (1995), both composed of vignettes, are tongue-in-cheek morality plays that merit little attention. The lush costume drama The Marquise of O (1976), in contrast, is an excellent study of the absurd formalities of 18th century aristocracy and was recognized with the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. His other period pieces, regrettably, have not been as successful. Perceval le Gallois (1978), while original, is a failed experiment in stagy Arthurian storytelling, and the beautifully dull The Lady and the Duke (2001) is equally unsatisfying for most fans of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, the director has demonstrated incredible consistency, and that he was able to deliver a picture of this caliber so late in his career is astounding. The legacy that this man has bestowed upon us rivals that of any auteur, with arguably as many as ten tours de force over the last four decades. Why, then, is he the least honored among the ranks of the Nouvelle Vague and among all cinematic geniuses?
Stories of Rohmer's idiosyncrasies abound. An ardent environmentalist, he has never driven a car and refuses to ride in taxis. There is no telephone in his home. He delayed the production of Ma Nuit chez Maud for a year, insisting that certain scenes could only be shot on Christmas night. Once, he requested a musical score that could be played at levels inaudible to viewers. He refers to himself as "commercial," yet his movies turn slim profits playing the art house circuit. Normally, these are kinds of anecdotes that would endear a one with the cognoscenti. His most revealing quirk, however, is that he declines interviews and shuns the spotlight. Where Hitchcock, for instance, was always ready to talk shop, Rohmer has let his films speak for themselves. He is not worried about WHAT people think of them but THAT, indeed, they think.
It would be dangerous to supplant the aforementioned "je ne sais quoi" with words. Without demystifying Rohmer's cinema, still there are broad qualities to which one may point. First, it is marked by philosophical and artistic integrity. Long before Krzysztof Kieslowski, Rohmer came up with the concept of the film cycle, and this has permitted him to build on his own work in a unique manner. A devout Catholic, he is interested in the resisting of temptation, and what does not occur in his pieces is just as intriguing as what occurs. Apropos to the mention of his spirituality is his fascination with the interplay between destiny and free will. Some choice is always central to his stories. Yet, while his narrative is devoid of conventionally dramatic events, he shows a fondness for coincidence bordering on the supernatural. In order to maintain verisimilitude, then, he employs more "long shots" and a simpler, more natural editing process than his contemporaries. He makes infrequent use of music and foley, focusing instead on the sounds of voices. Of these voices, where his narrators are male (and it is ostensibly their subjective experience to which we are privy), his women are more intelligent and complex than his men. Finally, albeit deeply contemplative, Rohmer's work is rarely conclusive. Refreshingly un-Hollywood, rather than providing an escape from reality, it compels us to face the world in which we live.- Actress
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Born in Denmark, she came to Paris at 18. She met Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin and started as a top model. She met Jean-Luc Godard about a cameo in Breathless (1960), but she had to be naked and she refused to play in the movie. One year later, they wed and she became famous with the "Nouvelle Vague" movies directed by him, Jacques Rivette, and Agnès Varda.
In 1967, Serge Gainsbourg wrote his only film musical Anna (1967) for her, with the hit "Sous le soleil exactement". Then, she went to Hollywood for a few movies and came back to Paris. She wrote and directed Vivre ensemble (1973) after her divorce from Pierre Fabre. She later remarried, to Dennis Berry.- Actor
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Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples, and started out as an office clerk in order to raise money to support his poor family. He was increasingly drawn towards acting, and made his screen debut while still in his teens, joining a stage company in 1923. By the late 1920s he was a successful matinee idol of the Italian theatre, and repeated that achievement in Italian movies, mostly light comedies. He turned to directing in 1940, making comedies in a similar vein, but with his fifth film The Children Are Watching Us (1943), he revealed hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. It was also the first film he made with the writer Cesare Zavattini with whom he would subsequently make Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948), heartbreaking studies of poverty in postwar Italy which won special Oscars before the foreign film category was officially established. After the box-office disaster of Umberto D. (1952), a relentlessly bleak study of the problems of old age, he returned to directing lighter work, appearing in front of the camera more frequently. Although Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) won him another Oscar, it was generally accepted that his career as one of the great directors was over. However, just before he died he made The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970), which won him yet another Oscar, and his final film A Brief Vacation (1973). He died following the removal of a cyst from his lungs.- Director
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Agnès Varda was born on 30 May 1928 in Ixelles, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985) and Faces Places (2017). She was married to Jacques Demy. She died on 29 March 2019 in Paris, France.- Actress
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Zoe Lund was born Zoe Tamerlis to a Swedish mother and Romanian father on February 9, 1962 in New York City. She was an accomplished composer/musician and devout political activist at an early age. In 1981 at age 19, Lund gave a stunning performance as Thana, a mousy, mute garment worker and rape victim who violently strikes back against male oppression and exploitation of women in Abel Ferrara's outstanding distaff vigilante cult classic Ms .45 (1981). She was likewise excellent and impressive in a demanding dual role as both a murdered aspiring Southern Belle actress and the lookalike New York woman who was used to replace her in Larry Cohen's nifty thriller Special Effects (1984). From 1980 to 1985, Lund lived and worked with critic and filmmaker Edouard de Laurot. She did a guest spot on an episode of Miami Vice (1984) and appeared as herself in the racy documentary Heavy Petting (1989).
Lund co-wrote the script for and had a supporting role as a drug addict in Ferrara's crime drama Bad Lieutenant (1992). Lund was a staunch advocate of heroin drug use. In addition, she was a professional model in her 20s and a writer who penned various essays, short stories, novels and film scripts (one of these unfinished screenplays was about supermodel Gia Carangi; Lund appears as an interview subject in the documentary The Self-Destruction of Gia (2003) (in which she candidly discusses her own heroin use). In 1993, Lund wrote, directed and starred in the one and a half minute short feature Hot Ticket (1993). Zoe Lund was working on a short story anthology when she died of drug-related heart failure at the tragically young age of 37 in Paris, France on April 16, 1999.- Actress
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Mylène Demongeot, one of the blond sex symbols of French cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, managed to overcome typecasting and survived a long hiatus before a stellar comeback in her 70s. She appeared in more than 70 films, including such classics as the Fantomas trilogy.
She was born Marie-Helene Demongeot on September 29, 1935, in Nice, France, into a family of actors. Her parents met in Shanghai, China, and moved to Nice, where she grew up. Her mother, Klaudia Trubnikova, was a Russian-Ukrainian émigré from Kharkiv, who escaped from the horrors of the Russian Civil War. Her father, Alfred Demongeot, was of French-Italian heritage. The family was bilingual and young Mylène was able to speak Russian and French, but eventually switched to French.
As a young girl she was an outcast: she suffered from ruthless kids making vicious comments about her eyes (she was cross-eyed until she had surgery in her teens). She was fond of music and movies, a perfect escape from the horrors of WWII that devastated Europe during her childhood. At the age of 13, she went to Paris and continued her education. She studied piano under the tutelage of Marguerite Long and Yves Nat. She then studied dramatic art with Maria Ventura at Le Cours Simon in Paris. At 15 she became a model in the atelier of Pierre Cardin.
At 17, Mylène made her film debut in the supporting role of Nicole in Children of Love (1953). Appearing in three or four feature films every year, she rose to international fame in the late 1950s. She was together with Gary Cooper for the opening of the first escalator to be installed in a cinema (at the Rex Theatre in Paris) on June 7, 1957. She had a memorable seduction scene opposite Yves Montand in The Crucible (1957). Her first notable leading role was in Be Beautiful But Shut Up (1958) (aka "Blonde for Danger") in which she played a 17-year-old jewel smuggler.
Mylène further developed her screen image of a manipulative blond mistress in her brilliant performance opposite David Niven in Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and became permanently locked in the cliché image of a humorous seductress after co-starring with Alain Delon in the 1959 comedy Three Murderesses (1959). Her chance to update her film image came in period films. She played manipulative and coquettish Andromeda opposite Steve Reeves in The Giant of Marathon (1959) and the leading role of Rea opposite Roger Moore in Romulus and the Sabines (1961). Among her best known roles are the manipulative Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers: Part I - The Queen's Diamonds (1961) and Helen in all three of the Fantomas films.
Mylène Demongeot became one of the blond sex symbols in 1950s, 60s and 70s French cinema. She co-starred with the major French actors of the time, including Jean Marais and Louis de Funès, in the Fantomas (1964) trilogy. Although she gradually phased out of the stereotypical image of a beautiful coquette, she still looked pretty convincing as a middle-aged Madame, which she developed in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time her acting career came to a pause, as she had been aging gracefully in the South of France. She was also a producer during that time and was the co-owner of Kangarou Films, a production company that she founded with her late husband Marc Simenon. After a lengthy hiatus, she made a comeback in 36th Precinct (2004). She has also appeared in Camping (2006) and La Californie (2006) by director/writer Jacques Fieschi, based on a short story by Georges Simenon.
In addition to her film work, Mylène has also written several books, the best-known of which would be "Tiroirs Secrets" and "Animalement vôtre". In the 2000s, she made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of her mother in Kharkiv, Ukraine. There she planted a commemorative tree and presented her autobiographical book, "Les Lilas de Kharkov" (The Lilacs of Kharkiv). In 2006, she was named Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters for her achievements in acting. She resides in her French hometown of Nice.- Writer
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The name "Melville" is not immediately associated with film. It conjures up images of white whales and crackbrained captains, of naysaying notaries and soup-spilling sailors. It is the countersign to a realm of men and their deeds, both heroic and villainous. It is the American novel, with its Ishmaels and its Claggarts a challenge to the European canon. It is Herman Melville. And yet, for over three decades, it was also worn by one of the French cinema's brightest lights, Jean-Pierre Melville, whose art was as revolutionary as that of the eponymous author.
Jean-Pierre Grumbach was born on October 20, 1917, to a family of Alsatian Jews. In his youth he studied in Paris, where he was first exposed to great films, among them Robert J. Flaherty's and W.S. Van Dyke's silent documentary White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). It left so deep a mark upon the pubescent Grumbach that he became a regular at the cinema, an obsession that would benefit him in adulthood. His own earliest efforts, 16mm home movies, were made with a camera given to him by his father in this period. In 1937, however, his career was forestalled when he began obligatory service in the French army. He was still in uniform when the Nazis invaded in 1940; under the nom de guerre of Melville, he aided the Resistance and was eventually forced to flee to England. There he joined the Free French forces and took part in the Allies' liberation of continental Europe. After the war, despite a desire to revert to Grumbach, he found that pseudonym had stuck.
Eager to earn his place in the movie industry, Melville applied to the French Technicians' Union but was denied membership. Undaunted by what he regarded as party politics, he set up his own production company in 1946 and started releasing films outside the system. The first, a low-budget short titled 24 Hours in the Life of a Clown (1946), was a success, inspired by his boyhood love for the circus. His feature-length debut, The Silence of the Sea (1949), was highly innovative. An intimate piece on the horrors of World War II, it starred unknown actors and was filmed by a skeleton crew. Its schedule was unusual: It was shot over 27 days in the course of a year. Its production was unusual: it incorporated "on-location" scenes--rarities in that era--done without vital permits. Its provenance was unusual: it was adapted from a book before the author's consent was obtained. Above all, its style was unusual. Its dark, claustrophobic sets and bottom-lit close-ups signaled a departure from the highly cultured cinema of René Clair, Marcel Pagnol, Abel Gance and Jacques Feyder. It was neither comedietta nor costume drama nor avant-garde "cinéma pur." Where its roots may have been in Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937), it was clearly something new.
Over the following 12 years Melville continued to create films that would influence the auteurs of La Nouvelle Vague (i.e., the French New Wave.) In 1950 he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on an unsatisfying version of The Terrible Children (1950), the tale of a strange, incestuous relationship between siblings. When You Read This Letter (1953), with French and Italian backing, was his first commercial project. While it was unprofitable, the fee he received allowed him to establish a studio outside of Paris. His next work, Bob the Gambler (1956), featured Roger Duchesne, a popular leading man of the 1930s who had drifted into the underworld during the war. As such, he was a uniquely apt choice for the role of the fashionable, self-immolating Bob. His supporting cast included Daniel Cauchy as toadying sidekick Paolo and newcomer Isabelle Corey as the temptress Anne. Although the picture was not a hit, it was a favorite of the aficionados that frequented Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Français. Among them were the young savants Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, the latter of whom used Guy Decomble of "Bob le flambeur" in his The 400 Blows (1959) that ushered in the "New Wave" era. They adored the hip, new rendering of a tired scenario, much of it shot in the streets with hidden cameras. They viewed it as fresh and daring, a "freeing up" through the rejection of high-minded literary adaptations and the embracing of pop culture. Simply put, Melville refused to play by the rules, and they followed suit.
In retrospect, "Bob le flambeur" seems straightforward: A reformed mobster turned high-stakes gambler comes out of retirement to pull one last job. Its genius lies in its simplicity. Melville admired American culture, as his alias indicated. He drove around Paris in an enormous Cadillac, sporting a Stetson hat and aviator sunglasses. He drank Coca-Cola and listened to American radio. The works of American directors John Ford and Howard Hawks were appealing to him, as they were ageless sagas of heroes and villains. Melville strove to build his own pantheon by blending the American ethos with his postwar sensibilities. As he perceived it, it was America that had valiantly rescued France from German occupation. Still, for a young man with Alsatian roots, the line separating good guys and bad guys had been breached, and one can see this disillusionment from The Silence of the Sea (1949) onward. Thus, while he borrowed from the American noir's revolt against the dichotomous Hollywood creations of the 1930s, the artist was forging his own apocryphal brand of dark tragedy. In his paradigm, a criminal could be a kind of hero within his milieu, so long as he stuck by his word and his allegiances. It was his personal style and his adherence to the code of honor that defined a "good guy"; obversely, it was his faith in others that was his downfall. It is a universe without the possibility for salvation, in which love and friendship are brief interludes in the cat-and-mouse games that lead to certain destruction. In that sense, Bob is a crucial link between Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Godard's Breathless (1960), in which Melville gave a brilliant cameo performance.
Jean-Pierre Melville is often regarded as the godfather of the Nouvelle Vague. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that had it not been for his aforementioned passion for American film, he might have shown us a very different "Bob le flambeur". Originally conceived as a hard-boiled gangster flick about the step-by-step plotting of a heist, Melville was forced to rethink its narrative after watching John Huston's remarkably similar The Asphalt Jungle (1950). It was only then that he had the idea to turn Bob into the comedy of manners that so delighted the cinephiles of the day. For this and other debts of gratitude, his next picture, Two Men in Manhattan (1959), was "a love letter to New York" and the America he revered. It was also his third straight box-office flop, however, and it caused Melville to break away from a New Wave movement that he felt catered to the cognoscenti. He later said, "If . . . I have consented to pass for their adopted father for a while, I do not wish it anymore, and I have put some distance in between us."
The first step in this split came with Léon Morin, Priest (1961), a wartime piece about a priest's endeavors to bring redemption to the inhabitants of a small town. Produced by Carlo Ponti, it was a big-budget affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, both household names by then. On the strength of its favorable reception, Melville released four consecutive cops-and-robbers movies, the most notable of which were The Informer (1962) and The Samurai (1967). Belmondo again headlined in "Le Doulous", not as a clergyman but as the fingerman Silien, whose loyalty to his old mob cronies entangles him in a web of intrigue and disaster. During the making of "Le Samouraï", a hauntingly minimalist film about a doomed assassin, Melville's studio burned to the ground and the project was completed in rented facilities. Regardless, it was a critical and commercial success. Presenting Alain Delon as ultra-cool assassin Jef Costello, it was considered one of the most meticulously-crafted pictures in the history of the cinema. Delon would later star in a second masterpiece, The Red Circle (1970), featuring the ultimate onscreen jewel heist. His Charles Bronson-cum-Jack Lord sang-froid toughness served as a counterpoint in Melville's oeuvre to the lighter and less predictable Belmondo. Another memorable production was Army of Shadows (1969), an austere portrait of perfidy within the ranks of the French Resistance.
It is trite to say that a particular artist is "not for everyone." In Melville's case, this statement could not be more fitting. Despite a round belly and an unattractive face, he was a notorious womanizer, and his chauvinism is painfully obvious in his movies. They are cynical, male-driven works in which women are devoid of nobility, merely functioning as beautiful chess pieces. His men also lack spiritual depth, diligently playing out their roles toward the final showdown. A "profound moment" inevitably occurs before a mirror, a cliché for which many critics do not share the creator's enthusiasm. As a result of these peccadilloes, as well as its lack of back-stories and character motivations, Melville's later output has been accused of stiffness, with its wooden troupe of cops, crooks and general mauvais sujets. Further, well-structured plots notwithstanding, Melville films are methodically paced with tremendous attention paid to time and place. Hollywoodphiles often find them slow, with an overemphasis on tone and style.
Some have gone as far as to claim that the réalizateur's genius was outstripped by his importance to the development of the medium. They look to him as a sort of Moses figure, helping to guide the Nouvelle Vague to the promised land without partaking in its fruits. At his death by heart attack in 1973, the 55-year-old had directed just 14 projects, at least six of which are acknowledged classics. Aside from Godard and Truffaut, luminaries such as John Woo, Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Volker Schlöndorff, Johnnie To and Martin Scorsese have pointed to him as an key influence. If a man's legacy is best measured not only by its quality but by the respect of his colleagues, Jean-Pierre Melville's contribution to cinema surely ranks with the greatest.- Producer
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Anthony Bourdain was born in New York City, to Gladys (Sacksman), an NYT staff editor, and Pierre Bourdain, a Columbia Records executive. He attended The Englewood School for Boys in New Jersey and Vassar College (for two years), and was a graduate of The Culinary Institute of America. He began his career in the food industry as a dishwasher, gradually working his way up through preparation, to line cook, sous chef, and chef. He was executive chef of Manhattan's Brasserie Les Halles, which meant, in his words, that he got to "swan around the kitchen, taking credit for others' work." Bourdain lived in New York City, and had a daughter Ariane, with his wife Ottavia.- Actor
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Steve Ihnat was born on 7 August 1934 in Jastrabie, Czechoslovakia [now Jastrabie pri Michalovciach, Slovak Republic]. He was an actor and writer, known for Countdown (1967), The Honkers (1972) and Do Not Throw Cushions Into the Ring (1970). He was married to Sally Carter-Ihnat. He died on 12 May 1972 in Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, France.- Actress
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The girl who one day would be known as "Winnipeg's Sweetheart" was born at Grace Hospital on December 4, 1921, as Edna Mae Durbin. In her early childhood there were no obvious signs that one day she would be a bigger box office attraction than Shirley Temple. Renamed Deanna Durbin for show business purposes, by age 21 she was the most highly paid female star in the world. Her major motion pictures were Three Smart Girls (1936), Mad About Music (1938) and That Certain Age (1938). By the time she was 18 her income was $250,000 a year. Her voice was often described as "natural and beautiful" and her version of "One Fine Day" from Madame Butterfly, became a classic. Deanna was a Hollywood star in every way. There were Deanna Durbin dolls and dresses. An engineering firm named its so-called dream home in her honor. Her first screen kiss was described in a headline story across the continent. What makes Deanna Durbin's story different is that she was never comfortable with adulation. When she was at the top of her career as Hollywood's leading actress and singer, she turned her back on that world for a life of seclusion. Her first two marriages had failed, and before she married her third husband, director Charles David, she set one condition: he had to promise that she could have what she yearned for - "the life of nobody". Her seclusion is incomplete. She lives in the French village of Neauphlé-le-Château, and for over 35 years has resisted every approach from film companies. Her husband has told journalists that "Mario Lanza pleaded with her for years to make a film with him. But she will never go back to that life." She granted only one interview since 1949 to film historian David Shipman in 1983.- Actress
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Stéphane Audran was born on November 8, 1932 in Versailles, Seine-et-Oise [now Yvelines], France as Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville. She was an actress, known for Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie (1972), Babettes Fest (1987) and Der Schlachter (1970). She was married to Claude Chabrol and Jean-Louis Trintignant. She died at the age of 85 on March 27, 2018 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France after an illness.- Director
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George P. Breakston was born on 20 January 1920 in Paris, France. He was a director and producer, known for Jungle Stampede (1950), Life Returns (1934) and Manster (1959). He died on 19 May 1973 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France.- Valerie Quennessen became an actress almost by accident. She started out performing as a child as an acrobat. She was very accomplished in this field and won an award at the age of ten. However, she hadn't seriously considered performing for a living. In her late teens, she enrolled in acting classes as therapy, to overcome severe shyness. To her surprise, she found she enjoyed it and her abilities were noted positively by others. So after briefly attending the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Techniques du Theatre, she left school to perform full time. She won supporting roles in various projects. Her big break was her role in French Postcards (1979) in 1978. The following year, she completed her studies and traveled to the United States to find roles in Hollywood. She won a role as a princess in Conan the Barbarian (1982), a role she accepted because she had enjoyed fairy tales as a child. She became more familiar to American audiences when she starred in Summer Lovers (1982) with Peter Gallagher and Daryl Hannah. Playing an archaeologist, she dug at an ancient find and, to everyone's surprise, found some real ancient pottery from some 3,500 years ago. The film achieved box office success, in spite of poor reviews. However, afterwards, she left Hollywood to concentrate on her family life.
In 1989, she died in an automobile accident. She was 31 years old. - Actor
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Jimmy Butler was born on 20 February 1921 in Akron, Ohio, USA. He was an actor, known for The Awakening of Jim Burke (1935), No Greater Glory (1934) and Battle of Greed (1937). He was married to Jean Fahrney. He died on 18 February 1945 in Théding, Moselle, France.- Director
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Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for The Meetings of Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and A Couch in New York (1996). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, France.- A classic beauty, blonde French actress Michèle Morgan was one of her country's most popular leading ladies for over five decades. Born Simone Renee Roussel on Leap Year Day (February 29) in 1920, she ran away from home as a teenager and studied acting under René Simon, beginning her film career at 16 working as a film extra to pay for drama classes.
The young actress soon caught the eye of director Marc Allégret, who cast her in Heart of Paris (1937), which clinched her stardom. Her remote, enigmatic features and gloomy allure had audiences comparing her to a young Greta Garbo. She went on to appear elegantly opposite Charles Boyer in the drama Orage (1938) directed by Allegret; opposite Jean Gabin in Moth and the Flame (1938) directed by Marcel Carné, as well as both Coral Reefs (1939) and Remorques (1941). She had her first top-billed roles in L'entraîneuse (1939) and La loi du nord (1939).
Michèle's eventual fled war-torn France for Hollywood and earned roles based purely on her European prestige. She did not stand out among the other female foreign imports of that time, however, such as Ingrid Bergman. Cast in rather routine sultry roles amid WWII surroundings, she received only a modest reception for such US-based films as Joan of Paris (1942) with Paul Henreid; Two Tickets to London (1943) with Alan Curtis; Passage to Marseille (1944) opposite Humphrey Bogart; and the noirish The Chase (1946) starring Robert Cummings.
Michèle succeeded much better at home continuing prolifically in such films as The Proud and the Beautiful (1953), The Moment of Truth (1952), Oasis (1955), The Grand Maneuver (1955), Shadow of the Guillotine (1956) (as Marie Antoinette), Grand Hotel (1959), Bluebeard (1963), Web of Fear (1964), The Diary of an Innocent Boy (1968) and Cat and Mouse (1975). Back in the late 1940's, she received the very first Cannes Film Festival award for "best actress" for her touching performance as the blind heroine in Pastoral Symphony (1946). She also received an honorary Cesar Award in 1992.
Married during the war and early post-war years (1942-1949) to American actor/singer William Marshall, Michèle's second husband was handsome Gallic star Henri Vidal and they appeared together in a couple of films, including both the historical drama Fabiola (1949) and romantic drama La belle que voilà (1950), plus The Seven Deadly Sins (1952) (albeit different "sin" segments) and Napoleon (1955). Following Vidal's sudden death of a heart at age 40 in 1959, the actress married a third time one year later to well-known French actor/writer/director Gérard Oury. They had unbilled cameos in A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later (1986). She was left a widow in 2006.
Semi-retired by the 1970's, Michèle's last feature film was a small bit in the Marcello Mastroianni film Everybody's Fine (1990). She retired in 1999 after a few sporadic 90's TV parts. She died in her home town of Hauts-de-Seine, France on December 20, 2016, at age 96. - Writer
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The comic genius Jacques Tati was born Taticheff, descended from a noble Russian family. His grandfather, Count Dimitri, had been a general in the Imperial Army and had served as military attaché to the Russian Embassy in Paris. His father, Emmanuel Taticheff, was a well-to-do picture framer who conducted his business in the fashionable Rue de Castellane and had taken a Dutch-Italian woman, Marcelle Claire van Hoof, as his wife. To Emmanuel's lasting dismay, Jacques had no intention of following in the family trade of framing and restoration. Instead, he went on to pursue an education (specialising in arts and engineering) at the military academy of Lycée de Saint Germain-en-laye. After graduating, his main preoccupation became sports. He already boxed and played tennis and was introduced to rugby during a sojourn in London. Back in Paris, he joined the Racing Club de France (1925-30), and for some time seriously contemplated a career as a professional rugby player. However, Jacques also had an uncanny talent for pantomime, imitating athletes at his school to the amusement of classmates and teachers. By the time he had reached the age of 24, encouraged by his success as an entertainer in the annual revue of the Racing Club, he suddenly decided to combine his two passions and, without further ado, entered the world of show business.
From 1931, Jacques toured the Parisian music halls, theatres and circuses with his impersonations, acrobatics, drunk waiter and comic tennis routines (the latter would be famously re-enacted by his alter ego, Monsieur Hulot). He had by this time changed his name to 'Tati' in order to accommodate theatre bills.The French magazine "Le Jour" was among the first to acknowledge his growing popularity, describing Jacques as "a clown of great talent". At the same time, he made his screen debut in a series of short featurettes, tailored to show off his practised gags, notably Oscar, champion de tennis (1932) and Watch Your Left (1936) ("Watch your left", a very funny boxing sketch). The Second World War, military service and inherent strictures resulting from the German occupation put a temporary halt to his career. Then, in 1946, through a friend, the writer-director Claude Autant-Lara, Jacques obtained a small role in the whimsical fantasy Sylvie et le fantôme (1946), about a girl (Odette Joyeux) in love with a ghost (Tati).
The small township of Sainte-Sévère, where Tati had taken refuge during the occupation, served as inspiration for his first film, initially conceived as a one-reeler entitled "L'Ecole des facteurs" (School for Postmen). Unable to find widespread distribution, Tati decided to re-shoot the bucolic comedy --with himself in the central role -- as a feature film, using the villagers as extras and filming everything on location. And thus, Jour de Fête (1949) and Francois the village postman came into being. However, the film was soon overshadowed by his next enterprise and a critic of the satirical publication Le Canard Enchainé even proposed to fight a duel with anyone who would prefer "Jour de Fete" to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953)!
With "Holiday", Tati reinvented the visual comedy of the silent era in a style not dissimilar to that of Max Linder. There is hardly any dialogue, except for background chatter, but natural and human noises are enhanced whenever required for the desired comic effect. The film is almost plotless, essentially comprised of a series of vignettes (to the recurring musical motif of Alain Romans's breezy 1952 composition "Quel temps fait-il à Paris?") at a seaside resort frequented by assorted holiday makers. All are stereotypical of their respective social class, as are the villagers themselves. Their inability to escape social conditioning and the stress they endure in the process of 'enjoying themselves' are observed with a keen satirical eye through their interaction with each other. At the centre is the ever-present character of the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, who arrives in a rickety 1924 Amilcar. Tall and reedy, clad in a poplin coat, wearing a crumpled hat, striped socks, trousers which are patently too short, rolled umbrella, a pipe firmly clenched between his teeth and perambulating with an odd stiff-legged gait, Hulot cuts an ungainly, yet hilarious figure. Well-meaning though he is, he invariably leaves disaster in his wake and departs the scene quickly as things go wrong, letting others sort out the mess. "Holiday" is more than just a brilliant collection of sight gags, but also an ironic observation of the foibles of human nature. Tati acknowledged the influence of both Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields in the creation of Hulot. Very much like Keaton or Charles Chaplin, he was also a consummate perfectionist who micro-managed each scene with unerring precision. Comedy for Tati was a serious business.
In Tati's subsequent ventures, Hulot became relegated from being the focus of the story to merely subordinate to its concept. As just one of many characters, Hulot weaves in and out of My Uncle (1958) and Playtime (1967), his simple, old-fashioned world contrasted sharply against the coldness of mechanisation, obsessive consumerism and the growing uniformity of houses and cities. "Playtime", shot in 70mm, took six years to make and required the creation of a massive glass and concrete high-rise set with myriad corridors and cubicles (dubbed 'Tativille' and built at a cost of $800,000) which raised the picture's total budget to $3 million and left Tati bankrupt. His next project, Trafic (1971), a satire of modern man's love of cars, failed to recoup these losses. Creditors impounded Tati's films, which were not re-released until 1977, when a canny Parisian distributor expunged his outstanding debts. Throughout his career, Tati remained obdurately committed to his artistic integrity and to his independence as a film maker. He was one of few directors who consistently employed non-professional actors. He turned down offers from Hollywood for a 15-minute series of television comedies, following the success of "Mon Oncle". He summed it all up by declaring "I could have satisfied the producers of the world by making a whole series of little Hulot films, and I would have made a lot of money. But I would not have been able to do what I like - work freely". (NY Times, November 6, 1982)- The radiant Françoise Dorléac is better remembered today as the elder, ill-fated sister of French film star Catherine Deneuve. The Paris-born actress, however, was actually the first to become a star and had quite a formidable career of her own in the 1960s until it was cut short. Born into a theatrical family in 1942 (her father was actor Maurice Dorléac), Françoise first appeared on stage at the age of 10.
Entering the film industry with the movie short Mensonges (1957), she studied at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique (1959-1961) and had modeled for Christian Dior by the time she started making any kind of cinematic impact. Slim, gamine, pale-skinned and a real brunette stunner, Françoise graced a number of movies before hitting celebrity stardom with François Truffaut's melodrama The Soft Skin (1964) and the classic James Bond-like spy spoof That Man from Rio (1964), both released in 1964. The two films showed the polar sides of Françoise's incredible allure and talent. In the former she played an airline stewardess who falls into a tragic affair with a married businessman (Jean Desailly) and in the latter she played a fun and flaky heroine opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. Unlike Catherine, Françoise proved a carefree, outgoing presence both on and off camera. Known for her chic, stylish ways and almost unbridled sense of joie-de-vivre, she continued making strong marks as the adulterous wife in Roman Polanski's black comedy Cul-de-sac (1966) and even joined Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, and her sister, who was now a cinematic star by this time too, in the rather candy-coated The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a colorful movie which paid homage to the Hollywood musical. She and Catherine, who looked quite similar, played singing twins who dream about living in Paris.
Her fun and funny side was always an asset and often revealed as in the films as Arsène Lupin contre Arsène Lupin (1962) and Male Hunt (1964). Branching out now in such non-French movies as Genghis Khan (1965), Where the Spies Are (1965), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), the luminous Françoise was on the brink of international stardom when her rental car flipped and burned on a roadway in Nice, France on June 26, 1967. She was near completion of the last film mentioned at the time the accident occurred. Her part in the movie was left intact. Her early death at age 25 most certainly robbed the cinema of a tried and true talent and incomparably beautiful mademoiselle who showed every sign of taking Hollywood by storm, as Catherine later did. - Writer
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Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.- Actor
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Philippe Noiret was one of French cinema's most familiar faces who appeared in more than 140 films in a career that spanned more than half a century.
He was born on October 1, 1930, in Lille, Nord, France, into a middle class family of shopkeepers. His father was fond of literature. Young Noiret attended the College Janson-of-Sally in the 16th arrondissement in Paris. At school, he was more interested in acting than in academics; he failed to pass his baccalaureate exams three times and left school without graduation. He studied acting at the Centre Dramatique de l'Ouest (Western Drama Theatre). There, in 1950, Noiret made his debut sharing the stage with Gérard Philipe under directorship of Roger Blin . From 1953-1960 Noiret was a permanent member of the troupe with the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in Paris. There he played over 40 roles in seven years under directorship of Jean Vilar. While there he met actress Monique Chaumette, whom he married in 1962, and they had one daughter, Frederique. At that time Noiret continued his acting career as a stand-up comedian and a night club entertainer.
Noiret made his big screen debut playing bit part in Gigi (1949), then earned his first on-screen credit in Agence matrimoniale (1952). He landed his first leading role as Lui, a government inspector, in the French New Wave film La Pointe Courte (1955) by notable female director Agnès Varda. His first big success came in 1960 with Louis Malle 's film Zazie in the Metro (1960) (aka.. Zazie in the Metro). In 1968 he became a star in France with the title role in Very Happy Alexander (1968). After that success, Noiret moved on with his acting career and devoted himself almost entirely to the big screen. Noiret's trademark hangdog face and his range allowed him to portray a middle-class man or an aristocrat, but not a handsome romantic hero, so he was cast primarily as the Everyman character. In The Big Feast (1973), an allegoric film about sex orgy and suicide by overeating, which caused a scandal at Cannes in 1973, Noiret co-starred in a controversial role as suicidal judge Philippe, alongside Marcello Mastroianni.
Philippe Noiret shot to international fame with the supporting role as Alfredo, an old man who is a small town projectionist who befriends and inspires a young boy, in Cinema Paradiso (1988). He received international acclaim for his portrayal of the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in The Postman (1994) by director Michael Radford. Noiret won two Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and earned three more Cesar nominations. In 1976 he won his first Cesar for his exceptional performance as Julien Dandieu, a surgeon who kills the Nazis in revenge for the death of his wife and daughter, in The Old Gun (1975) (aka.. The Old Gun). Noiret won his second Cesar for the leading role as Major Delaplane in Life and Nothing But (1989) (aka.. Life and Nothing But) in 1990. Over the years, Noiret worked with all of the France's top directors. He also made excellent radio performances and popular books readings, which he narrated with his serious voice and impeccable diction. He was decorated with the Knight of the Legion of Honor.
Philippe Noiret was also known as an elegant hedonist and an avid dog lover. His other interests outside of the acting profession included art, horses, gourmet cuisine and cigars. For about 30 years he resided in his country house in the wine country near Carcassonne, in the South of France, where he generously supported the local causes. Noiret died of generalized complications of cancer on November 23, 2006, in a hospital, in Paris, and was laid to rest in Cimetière du Monparnasse in Paris, France.- Director
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- Actor
Claude Chabrol was born on 24 June 1930 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, known for Le Beau Serge (1958), La Cérémonie (1995) and Story of Women (1988). He was married to Aurore Chabrol, Stéphane Audran and Agnès Goute. He died on 12 September 2010 in Paris, France.- This stunning, fragile starlet was born Henriette Michèle Leone Girardon in Lyon in August 1938. Having completed her acting studies at the local conservatoire she won a competition as "the most photogenic girl in France" by the age of twenty. Photo shoots followed and a minor career as a model with appearances on the cover of prestige magazines "Vogue" and ""Marie-Claire". She began on screen with prominent supporting roles as a deaf mute in Luis Buñuel's Death in the Garden (1956) and as a secretary in Louis Malle's The Lovers (1958). Her first starring role came courtesy of Éric Rohmer who cast her in the lead of Sign of the Lion (1962) -- one of the first films of the French Nouvelle Vague movement, shot on location in Paris. Though not a commercial success at the time, the acting received general praise throughout and Michèle attracted attention from Hollywood. Paramount approached her with an offer to appear as the owner of a Tanzanian game farm opposite John Wayne in the African adventure Hatari! (1962). According to a Life magazine profile of July 1961 Michèle 'taught herself English' on the set. Her role did not lead to a Hollywood contract. Nevertheless, for a while she remained in demand for European productions, the pick of the bunch being leads in the Spanish-made swashbuckler The Adventures of Scaramouche (1963) and the Italian comedy The Magnificent Cuckold (1964). Less high profile, but decidedly decorative, was her supporting role in the Franco-Italian "Alfie'-lookalike comedy Tender Scoundrel (1966).
By the early 70's, film offers had dried up and Michèle's career was seriously on the skids. She became increasingly despondent, especially after the end of an unhappy dalliance with a married Spanish aristocrat, José Luis de Vilallonga (a writer and occasional actor with a well-earned reputation as a cad and spendthrift). Michèle Girardon decided to end her life by ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills in her home town on March 25, 1975, aged just 36. In a tragic irony, two co-stars in Michèle's penultimate film Les petites filles modèles (1971), Marie-Georges Pascal and Bella Darvi, also committed suicide at the ages of 39 and 42, respectively. - Actress
- Writer
- Director
Nathalie Delon was born on 1 August 1941 in Oujda, French Protectorate Morocco [now Morocco]. She was an actress and writer, known for The Samurai (1967), They Call It an Accident (1982) and The French Dispatch (2021). She was married to Alain Delon and Guy Barthelemy. She died on 21 January 2021 in Paris, France.