STÉPHANE AUDRAN

(8 November 1932 - 27 March 2018)

The French actress Stéphane Audran, who has died aged 85 after a long illness, was born Colette Suzanne Dacheville in Versailles. She came to fame in the films of her second husband, Claude Chabrol, who directed her in 24 films and two television programmes. She often played strong women with an air of mystery or of the criminal about them. Audran began her career in the theatre during the 1950s, but without much success. It was only when she entered films in Le jeu de la nuit in 1957, then Secrets of a French Nurse and The Lovers of Montparnasse, before Chabrol cast her in his second feature, Les Cousins (1959), with Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. Then came many more Chabrol films, including Les bonnes femmes, Les godelureaux, with Brialy, L’oeil du malin, Bluebeard, Paris vu par, Blue Panther, Line of Demarcation, Le scandale, Les biches, La femme infidèle, La rupture, Juste avant la nuit (Bafta award), Les noces rouges, Blood Relatives, Violette Nozière (French César Award) and many others. One Chabrol film that made a difference to Audran’s career was the Hitchcockian murder mystery Le boucher (1970), with Jean Yanne in the villainous title role. She was also delightful in Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel’s drama about a French refugee taken on as a cook in Denmark during the Franco-Prussian War. In between the Chabrol films, Audran also worked for Eric Rohmer, Anatole Litvak, Frédéric Rossif, Claude Sautet, Georges Lautner etc and, more famously, Luis Buñuel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bafta award) and for Édouard Molinaro in La cage aux folles II. Among her films in English were Peter Collinson’s And Then There None (from Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians), The Black Bird, a remake of The Maltese Falcon with George Segal, Silver Bears with Michael Caine, The Devil’s Advocate with John Mills, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One and the TV series Brideshead Revisited. Stéphane Audran appears to have retired in 2008, having made over a hundred films. Still to surface in the UK is The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’s last and unfinished film which has appearances by many of the great and good of Hollywood, plus Chabrol and Audran. Married in 1964, Chabrol and Audran divorced in 1980; they had a son, Thomas. Audran was also briefly married to the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant for two years in the 1950s, although they still appeared in films together after divorcing. Chabrol died in 2010.

MICHAEL DARVELL