YVONNE FURNEAUX

(11 May 1926 - 5 July 2024)

The Anglo-French actress Yvonne Furneaux, who has died at the age of 98 from complications of a stroke, worked with many celebrated directors, although it was Federico Fellini who really contributed to making her a star player. She had already been in films since 1952, making her debut in Meet Me Tonight, with Valerie Hobson, based on three of the one-act plays that had made up Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30, her segment being set on the French Riviera. Perhaps Furneaux was cast because her name sounded French, but in fact, although she was born in Roubaix, France, it was to an English family.

Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd’s parents were Joseph Scatcherd, the director of a local French bank, and his wife, a Devonshire woman called Amy. Furneaux thought that a French name might get her more work in Europe so she used her mother’s maiden name. Subsequently she regretted doing so as she felt her French monicker perhaps typecast her as a beautiful but mysterious woman. After Oxford she trained at Rada and did stage work in Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew and later on in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

Furneaux was a very attractive woman, voluptuous even, and her career really took off when she was photographed for Vogue magazine by Norman Parkinson. Then Peter Brook cast her as Jenny Diver, the Irish pickpocket, in his adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera with Laurence Olivier as Captain MacHeath. In The Master of Ballantrae she was Jessie Brown to Errol Flynn’s Jamie Durie, and she worked (uncredited) with Flynn again on Crossed Swords, a swashbuckler with Gina Lollobrigida, and The Dark Avenger (aka The Warriors). Also, during the 1950s she was in Michael Anderson’s The House of the Arrow with Oscar Homolka, Hammer’s The Mummy and The Prince With the Red Mask, made in Italy by Leopoldo Savona. Working in Italy on Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) also led to more Continental parts such as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita which, with its huge international cast (Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Alain Cuny, Magali Noël, Nadia Gray and Lex Barker), was highly influential in world cinema, an iconic work coming right at the beginning of the 1960s.

It led to other European projects, although some were not exactly Grade A productions. The best was probably Claude Autant-Lara’s The Count of Monte Cristo in 1961 which gave her second-billing as Mercedes to Louis Jourdan’s Count. Otherwise she was Helen of Troy in The Lion of Thebes, Gilda in The Secret of Dr Mabuse, and Christine in Chabrol’s mystery-thriller The Champagne Murders, with Anthony Perkins and Stéphane Audran. In Polanski’s horror comic Repulsion, she was Helen, sister to Catherine Deneuve’s screwed-up manicurist, but she found the director unsympathetic. In her last picture in 1984 she had the title role as Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie – but enough about that.

From 1953 Furneaux appeared on TV in shows such as Douglas Fairbanks Presents, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Danger Man, Hereward the Wake and The Baron. She retired in the late 1960s after marrying the photographer Jacques Natteau, who died in 2007. They had a son, Nicholas. She lived in Switzerland but later moved to North Hampton in New Hampshire, where she died.

MICHAEL DARVELL