DANIELLE DARRIEUX

(1 May 1917 - 17 October 2017)

The French actress and singer Danielle Darrieux, who has died aged 100, was a mere 14 years old when she won her first film role in Le Bal in 1931, after which she worked continuously. Of the forty or so films she made before World War II, the outstanding ones were Mayerling (she played Maria Vetsera opposite Charles Boyer), Club des femmes, which caused a storm in New York with its risqué setting of a women-only hotel, Ruy Blas with Jean Marais, and Occupe-toi d’Amélie..!, Claude Autant-Lara’s Feydeau comedy adaptation. Later on she also did Rouge et noir for Autant-Lara, based on Stendhal’s novel. In the 1950s she worked with Max Ophuls on La Ronde, from the Arthur Schnitzler play, as well as Le plaisir and Madame de… Darrieux had a taste of Hollywood in 1938 in The Rage of Paris with Douglas Fairbanks Jr but then went back to France during the Occupation. She returned to Hollywood in the fifties for the MGM musical Rich, Young and Pretty, starred with James Mason in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 5 Fingers, and figured in Robert Rossen’s dull epic of Alexander the Great with Richard Burton. However, for the most part, Darrieux continued working extensively in French cinema and TV until Pièce montée in 2010, with an occasional outing for The Greengage Summer (1961), shot in France and the UK with Kenneth More. She contributed a delightful performance for Jacques Demy in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), and was also in his musical melodrama Une chambre en ville. Darrieux did some theatre work in Paris, and also on Broadway in the musical of Coco (taking over from Katharine Hepburn). In London and New York she was in Ambassador, a musical with Howard Keel. Among her last films was François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002) which earned her a Silver Bear at Berlin, and she voiced the Grandmother in the animated film Persepolis (2007). She was married three times: to director Henri Decoin, diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa and then scriptwriter Georges Mitsinkidès, who died in 1991. Darrieux received an honorary César award in 1985.

MICHAEL DARVELL