JEANNE MOREAU

(23 January 1928 - 31 July 2017)

French actress Jeanne Moreau, who has died of natural causes aged 89, was a very successful stage actress with the Comédie Française before becoming an iconic film star both in France and around the world. Along with her great acting ability, her face was her fortune throughout her long career. In films from 1949 she came to international recognition in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), a gangster picture with Jean Gabin. Many films later came Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold and The Lovers, both of which sealed her fate as an actress of some distinction. She was in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and then his Jules and Jim, in which she was famously fought over by Oskar Werner and Henri Serre. Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses was an updated version of the Laclos novel with Gérard Philipe. She had a brief appearance in Godard’s Une femme est une femme and made a stunning success as an impossible gambler in Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels. Le Feu Follet and Viva Maria! (Bafta award) were two further Louis Malle films, Luis Buñuel cast her as Céléstine in The Diary of a Chambermaid, and her first husband, Jean-Louis Richard, directed her in Mata Harai, agent H21. At around the same time she began appearing in English language films such as Peter Brook’s Moderato cantabile, Losey’s Eve, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, Carl Foreman’s The Victors, John Frankenheimer’s The Train and Anthony Asquith’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Mademoiselle and The Sailor from Gibraltar were both written by Moreau’s friend Marguerite Duras and directed by Tony Richardson. The Bride Wore Black was Truffaut’s tribute to Hitchcock (complete with music by Bernard Herrmann) with Moreau as a serial-killing widow. She had the title role in Great Catherine, went out West for Monte Walsh (with Lee Marvin), and to Hollywood for Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. In a very busy career she returned to Europe for film and television work, including Bertrand Blier’s Les valseuses, Losey’s Mr Klein, Fassbinder’s Querelle, Luc Besson’s Nikita and Ever After: A Cinderella Story which was filmed in France. In all she made nearly 150 film and TV appearances, her last film being Le talent de mes amis in 2015. Moreau won film festival awards all over the world and was honoured by the BFI with a Fellowship in 1990 and by Bafta with an Academy Fellowship in 1996. She also received a French Honorary César in 2008 for sixty years of cinema. Apart from Jean-Louis Richard, with whom she had a son, Jérôme, a painter, Jeanne Moreau was also married to the Greek actor Teodoro Rubanis and to the film director William Friedkin.

MICHAEL DARVELL