GENEVIÈVE PAGE

(13 December 1927 - 14 February 2025)

The French actress Geneviève Page, who has died at the age of 97, had a long and satisfying career of some seventy years, making her mark on both film and theatre. Although she worked much more in the cinema than on stage, she actually preferred the theatre. Nevertheless, she gave some excellent performances on both stage and screen.

She was born Geneviève Anne Marguerite Bonjean into a French artistic family. Her father, the art collector Jacques Paul Bonjean, specialised in 17th-century French artworks. Her mother was Germaine Lipman from the Jewish family founders of LIP, the watch and clock company. Genevieve’s godfather was Christian Dior who played piano with her mother. To escape the music Genevieve took to studying in the bathroom, reading Voltaire and with her innate talents was invited to join the Theatre National Populaire’s conservatory.

In 1943 Page appeared in Paul Claudel’s play Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper), produced by the author and actor Jean-Louis Barrault in an abridged staging of the original eleven-hour version (later on, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira made it a seven-hour film).

One of Page’s first films was the French thriller Pas de pitie pour les femmes, in 1951. Then she played Madame de Pompadour with Gérard Philippe and Gina Lollobrigida in the classic swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe, a huge global hit that won awards at Cannes and Berlin. In 1956 Foreign Intrigue was her first American movie, a film noir with Robert Mitchum and Ingrid Thulin. More films followed including Song Without End, a biopic about the composer Franz Liszt (played by Dirk Bogarde) with Capucine as Princess Carolyne and Page as Countess Marie d’Agouit. It was a film fraught with problems – director Charles Vidor died during filming and George Cukor took over. Bogarde was unhappy and many changes were made along the line. If the drama of the subject came across as superficial, at least the music was praised and the film won an Academy Award for best music score. The film did at least win a Golden Globe.

A better bet for Page was El Cid, the epic historical drama from Anthony Mann. With Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, it was rated as the best epic during the 1960s run of big-budget movies. Geneviève Page played Dona Urraca, sister of Alfonso VI. The film received three Oscar nominations for art direction, music and song. Page was kept busy working with other American as well as French directors. In the US she did Youngblood Hawke with James Franciscus (“The kind of man a woman could feel across a room”), John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix with James Garner, Terence Young’s Mayerling with Omar Sharif, Richard Quine’s A Talent for Loving with Richard Widmark, Robert Altman’s Beyond Therapy with Glenda Jackson and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Back in Europe she worked with Bertrand Blier on Buffet froid and films for Marcel Carné, Jean Becker, Claude Miller and Jacques Deray. Perhaps the film she will be most remembered for is Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), in which she played the madam of a high-class brothel that employs Catherine Deneuve, calling her ‘Belle de Jour’, who is working as a prostitute unknown to her husband.

It was Buñuel’s most successful film, winning awards at Venice and elsewhere. Page was married to the banker Jean-Claude Bujard from 1950 until his death in 2011. They had two children.

MICHAEL DARVELL