Jeanne Moreau

The theatre first

She was born in Paris in 1928, the daughter of a French restaurateur and an English dancer, and trained at the Conservatoire de Paris. She made her stage debut at the Avignon Festival in 1947 and joined the Comédie-Française, where she became one of the company's leading actresses in her twenties. The screen came later, and at first in smaller parts; she was a stage star before she was a film one.

The New Wave face

Louis Malle cast her twice in 1958. In Elevator to the Gallows she walks the night streets of Paris waiting for a lover, over an improvised Miles Davis score; in The Lovers she played a bored provincial wife whose frank affair made the film a scandal and, in the United States, the subject of a Supreme Court obscenity case. Both films treated her face as their subject, held in close-up and available light, and made her a star at thirty.

In 1962 François Truffaut cast her as Catherine in Jules and Jim, the woman two friends love across two decades and a war. It became her biggest international success and fixed her image for good — including the moment she stops the film to sing "Le Tourbillon," the waltz that turned her into a recording artist as well as an actress.

Working with everyone

Moreau moved between the New Wave and the wider art cinema of the 1960s with unusual freedom. She won best actress at Cannes in 1960 for Moderato Cantabile, played the sleepless heroine of Antonioni's La Notte (1961), gambled through Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), and took the title role in Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964). Orson Welles directed her in The Trial and Chimes at Midnight and called her the greatest actress in the world.

Directing and last years

From the mid-1970s she directed her own films, among them Lumière (1976) and L'Adolescente (1979), and never stopped acting. The honours accumulated late: a César for best actress in 1992, a BAFTA Fellowship in 1996, an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2003. She died in Paris on 31 July 2017, at eighty-nine, the last great star the New Wave had made.