EMMANUELLE RIVA

(24 February 1927 - 27 January 2017)

It was a great disappointment when, after she had been nominated for an Oscar in 2013, the 85-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Riva did not receive the award for her role in Michael Haneke’s Amour. However, she did win the best leading actress Bafta and was voted actress of the year in the London Critics’ Circle Awards, along with securing many other nominations and wins around the world. Riva also received a Bafta nomination for Hiroshima mon amour in 1961 and she won at Venice and in Mexico for Georges Franju’s Thérèse Desqueyroux in 1964. Amour was not even her last appearance, for she was in three more films after that and still has three more to be released. Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour was her first major film and the one that had the most impact in the UK. She also worked regularly on stage and on French television. In the cinema she was directed memorably by many of the great filmmakers of the time. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò is about escaping from a concentration camp, and in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Léon Morin, prêtre she falls in love with a priest. Riva appeared in Franju’s Thomas l’imposteur, Andre Cayatte’s Les risques du metier, Marco Bellocchio’s Gli occhi, la bocca, Krzysztof Kieslowśki’s Trois couleurs: Bleu and Julie Delpy’s delightful Le Skylab, among many others in a career encompassing nearly one hundred film and TV appearances. However, for most filmgoers it is probably for Hiroshima mon amour and Amour that this great French actress will be remembered.

MICHAEL DARVELL