Jeanne Moreau

Montmartre and an English mother

Jeanne Moreau was born on 23 January 1928 in Paris and grew up in Montmartre. Her father, Anatole-Désiré Moreau, was a restaurateur from the Mayenne in western France. Her mother, Katherine Buckley, was an English dancer from Oldham in Lancashire who had come to Paris to work at the Folies Bergère.[2]

The household was not a happy one and the marriage did not last. Moreau spoke English from her mother and French from her father, and she used both throughout her career, which is one reason she moved so easily between French, Italian, British and American films.

She decided to become an actress after seeing a performance of Jean Anouilh's Antigone as a teenager. Her father was strongly against it. She went anyway.

The Conservatoire and the Comédie-Française

Moreau entered the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique in Paris in 1947 and left it the following year for the Comédie-Française, the state theatre company. She was twenty, and she was the youngest full member of the company at the time.[2]

She stayed four years, playing classical parts, and then left for the Théâtre National Populaire, the company Jean Vilar ran at the Palais de Chaillot with the aim of putting serious theatre in front of ordinary audiences. She worked there through the 1950s.

Her stage reputation was made before her film reputation, and by different work. In 1956 she played Maggie in the first Paris production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the run was a considerable success.

Louis Malle, 1958

Moreau had been making films since 1949 without much effect. She had small parts, and in Touchez pas au grisbi in 1954 she appeared alongside Jean Gabin. French producers of the period considered her insufficiently photogenic for leads.

Louis Malle cast her twice in 1958 and the two films changed her career. In Lift to the Scaffold she plays a woman walking the Paris streets at night, waiting for a lover who does not come. The scenes were shot with available light on the Champs-Élysées, and Miles Davis improvised the score in a single session while watching the picture. In The Lovers she plays a bored provincial wife who leaves her husband and child after one night with a stranger.[3]

The Lovers caused trouble. It won a prize at the Venice film festival, and in the United States it was prosecuted as obscene. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1964, where a justice, unable to define hard-core pornography, wrote that he knew it when he saw it, and that this film was not it.

Jules et Jim

François Truffaut cast Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim, released in January 1962. Two friends, one Austrian and one French, both love the same woman across twenty years and a world war, and she marries one and leaves with the other and returns.

Moreau sings the film's song, Le Tourbillon, written by Serge Rezvani, in a single scene with a guitar. It became the piece of her work that the largest number of people know.

Catherine is not written as a likeable part. She is charming, destructive and finally lethal, and Moreau played her without asking the audience for sympathy. It is the performance that established what she was for: women who behave badly and are not apologised for.

The great decade

Between 1960 and 1968 Moreau worked with most of the directors then considered the best in Europe.

Peter Brook directed her in Moderato Cantabile in 1960, on a Marguerite Duras novel, and it won her the best actress prize at Cannes. Michelangelo Antonioni cast her in La Notte in 1961, as a wife walking through Milan on the last day of a marriage. Joseph Losey directed her in Eva in 1962. Luis Buñuel cast her in Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964. She made The Train with John Frankenheimer the same year, and Viva Maria! with Louis Malle and Brigitte Bardot in 1965.

Orson Welles used her three times: as Miss Bürstner in The Trial in 1962, as Doll Tearsheet in Chimes at Midnight in 1965, and in The Immortal Story in 1968. He described her in interviews as the greatest actress in the world. Truffaut brought her back for The Bride Wore Black in 1968, a revenge film made in open homage to Hitchcock.

Directing

Moreau directed two features. Lumière, in 1976, follows four actresses of different ages over a few days and was written as well as directed by her. L'Adolescente, in 1979, is about a girl of twelve spending a last summer in the country in 1939, with Simone Signoret as her grandmother.

She also made a documentary about the silent-film actress Lillian Gish in 1983. She was clear that she wanted to direct because she wanted to write parts for women that did not exist in the scripts she was sent.

Private life

Moreau married the actor and writer Jean-Louis Richard in 1949; their son Jérôme was born the same year, and the marriage ended in 1964. She had a long relationship with the couturier Pierre Cardin through the 1960s. In 1977 she married the American director William Friedkin; that marriage lasted two years.

She kept a house at La Garde-Freinet in the Var, in the hills behind Saint-Tropez, and spent much of her later life there and in an apartment in the eighth arrondissement of Paris.

Later work and honours

She went on working steadily. Rainer Werner Fassbinder cast her in Querelle in 1982. Luc Besson used her in Nikita in 1990, as the woman who trains an assassin to behave in polite society. In 1991 she took the title role in The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea, playing an ageing con artist, and won the César for best actress.

In 1975 she presided over the jury at the Cannes film festival, and she presided again in 1995. She received an honorary César in 1995, a BAFTA fellowship in 1996, and a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at Berlin in 2000. In 2000 she was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Death

Jeanne Moreau died at her Paris apartment on 31 July 2017, aged eighty-nine. She is buried in Montmartre cemetery, a short distance from the streets she grew up on.

The French president called her a national figure, and the tributes came from three generations of directors. She had made more than a hundred and thirty films across seven decades.

Why Jeanne Moreau matters

Moreau gave the New Wave an adult. The directors around her were in their twenties and making films about young people. She was a trained stage actress who could carry a part written for a woman with a history. Catherine in Jules et Jim, the wife in La Notte and the woman in Lift to the Scaffold are all built on that.

She also refused the roles the industry had for women of her age as she got older, and directed her own films rather than wait for better ones. The late performances — the trainer in Nikita, the con artist in The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea — exist because she kept insisting there was work in women past fifty.

The singer

Singing Le Tourbillon in Jules et Jim made Moreau a recording artist as well as a screen one. She released records through the 1960s, and went on performing songs for the rest of her life.