MICHELINE PRESLE
(22 August 1922 - 21 February 2024)
The French actress Micheline Presle, who has died at the age of 101 of unspecified causes, was noted for her versatility and stunning beauty. Beginning her career in 1937, she appeared in nearly 190 films in both France and the US, after which she moved back to France and continued her career for another fifty years.
Micheline Nicole Julia Emilienne Chassagne was born in Paris to the banker Robert Chassagne and his wife, the painter Julie Bachelier. Convent-educated, Micheline began training as an actress with the Belgian actor Raymond Rouleau and she was only fifteen when she made her first film, La Fessée, in 1937. Just one year later she received the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti as the most promising young actress in French cinema. It was not long before she made many good pictures, such as G.W. Pabst’s Girls in Distress, Georges Lacombe’s They Were Twelve Woman with Françoise Rosay, Abel Gance’s Paradise Lost and four films for Marcel L’Herbier – Comedy of Happiness, Foolish Husbands, La Nuit Fantastique and Ecco la Felicita. In 1947 with Gérard Philipe she appeared in Devil in the Flesh, Claude Autant-Lara’s controversial film about a married woman who has an affair with a schoolboy while her husband is away at war.
By 1950 she was appearing in Hollywood films, including Fritz Lang’s American Guerilla in the Phillipines – aka I Shall Return in the UK – with Tyrone Power as a US naval ensign stranded by the Japanese. In the same year she played opposite John Garfield in Under My Skin, a Hemingway story about her love for a jockey who falls foul of The Mob. She also appeared with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Captain Fabian which was filmed in France. It was directed by her then American husband William Marshall but Micheline had had enough of the US and she returned to France to pursue her career on home territory.
The films that came along saw her working with Sacha Guitry for Royal Affairs in Versailles, Jacques Demy for Donkey Skin, Jacques Rivette for The Nun, Philippe De Broca for Infidelity and King of Hearts, and Claude Lelouch for Les Misérables. She went back to Hollywood just twice, to play Sandra Dee’s mother in If a Man Answers in 1962, and The Prize with Paul Newman, in 1963. In the UK she made her mark in Joseph Losey’s Blind Date, a thriller with Hardy Kruger and Stanley Baker.
Presle’s marriage to William Marshall was short-lived – from 1949 to 1955 – although they had a daughter, the actress Tonie Marshall. Presle had already had a post-war marriage to the actor Michel Lefort from 1945 to 1949 and she later married the actor Henri Vidal with whom she had had an earlier affair. In a fairly tempestuous life, this elegant, beautiful and versatile actress had only two regrets, that she never worked with either Renoir or Truffaut.
MICHAEL DARVELL