French cinema has never been short of beautiful actresses.
Few, however, have managed the transition from starlet to superstar
with as much elegance and intelligence as Jeanne Moreau. Currently
enjoying her seventh decade in the movies, Moreau started out on the
stage, treading the boards for the Comédie Française from 1948 to
1951.
She first appeared onscreen playing minor parts in domestic genre pictures, such as period piece La Reine Margot and the noirish Touchez Pas Au Grisbi. An expressive actress, with wide eyes and a full, down-turned mouth, Moreau starred in some 20 films before rising to fame in the late 50s as one of the distinctive faces of the French New Wave.
Moreau et Malle
Her break came courtesy of 25-year-old novice director Louis Malle, who cast her as an adulterous femme fatale in Lift to the Scaffold, a stylish Hitchcockian exercise in suspense. Moreau enjoyed a brief relationship with Malle and starred in several of his films, appearing as a dissatisfied wife enveloped in amour fou in Les Amants, an alcoholic's old flame in Le Feu Follet and a good-time girl in female buddy movie Viva Maria!
She also starred in films for other New Wave luminaries. She has a cameo in Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme est une Femme and plays a gambler in Jacques Demy's La Baie des Anges. Her turn as Catherine, the tempestuous tormentor of Jules et Jim, brought her international acclaim in 1961. Such films saw Moreau playing the 'new woman' of the New Wave. Fiercely independent, free-spirited and eschewing (mostly sexual) inhibitions, her characters often seemed to be onscreen incarnations of the writings of Françoise Sagan or Marguerite Duras.
La Femme Internationale
Jules et Jim showcased Moreau's considerable musical ability - she sings the signature song Le Tourbillon de la Vie (Whirlpool Of Life). Like the other female stars of the New Wave, Anna Karina and Brigitte Bardot, she was to enjoy a parallel career as a chanteuse. Unlike Bardot (her co-star in Viva Maria!) and Karina (the lead in Une Femme est une Femme), Moreau survived the New Wave's collapse in the late 1960s. This was partly due to her work with a plethora of critically acclaimed European filmmakers. Michelangelo Antonioni cast her alongside Marcello Mastroianni in La Notte, while Luís Buñuel gave her a role in the controversial Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre. Both cast her, in part, for her distinctive walk.
The daughter of an English mother and a French father, Moreau has always held a certain international appeal. She has continually displayed an acute awareness of changing trends in world cinema. She worked within the German New Wave, playing a brothel keeper in Querelle, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film, and also made two films with British Free Cinema helmer Tony Richardson.
In the 70s and 80s she collaborated with a new generation of French filmmakers. She dived into a ménage à trois with Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Bertrand Blier's controversial Les Valseuses, and had a minor role in Nikita, a key work of the 'cinéma du look' movement. In these films and two of her finest recent features, Map of the Human Heart and Je M'Appelle Victor, the mature Moreau chose to collaborate with young directors.
Whirlpool Life
Next year, Moreau turns 75. She has appeared in more than 100 films, directed two features (Lumière and L'Adolescente) and recorded several popular albums. Retrospectives of her work regularly appear on TV and in the cinema, and she is repeatedly awarded with honorary accolades for past achievements. Nevertheless, she continues to look forward. The whirlpool life of this sensual grande dame shows no sign of slowing down.
Chris Wiegand
Previous
films on BBC Four
