Jeanne Moreau

Jeanne Moreau — Biography

Paris saw both the birth, on 23 January 1928, and the death, on 31 July 2017, of Jeanne Moreau, a French stage and screen actress, singer, screenwriter and director. Born in the 10th arrondissement of Paris to a French barman and a British dancer, she appeared in well over a hundred and thirty films during a career spanning more than half a century, and in the 1950s and 1960s she became one of the most recognisable faces of the French New Wave. Orson Welles, her friend and sometime collaborator, regarded her as the finest actress of her time.

Classically trained, Moreau studied at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique and made her stage debut in 1947 at the Avignon Festival with the Comédie-Française, where she soon counted among the company's leading actresses before moving on to the Théâtre National Populaire. From 1949 she took minor film roles; the Fernandel vehicle Meurtres? (1950) and Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), opposite Jean Gabin, stood out among these early appearances.

Widespread fame came through two pictures directed by Louis Malle, Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and The Lovers (1958). The 1960s proved her most productive decade: her performance in Peter Brook's Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960) earned her the best actress award at Cannes, while Viva Maria! (1965) brought her the BAFTA for best foreign actress. Other landmark films of the period include Antonioni's La Notte (1961), Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), Welles's The Trial (1962), Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), plus Mademoiselle (1966) and The Bride Wore Black (1968).

Across her career she worked with directors such as Jacques Becker, Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, Jean Renoir and Jacques Demy. In later years she featured in Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), Luc Besson's Nikita (1990), Angelopoulos's The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) and Beyond the Clouds (1995) by Antonioni and Wenders. Her role in The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea won her the César for best actress in 1992, and she continued acting into her eighties, appearing for the last time in Manoel de Oliveira's Gebo and the Shadow (2012).

She also directed, beginning with Lumière in 1976 and followed by L'Adolescente in 1979, and she wrote screenplays and produced films. As a singer she performed chansons and recorded albums, among them Jeanne Moreau chante Bassiak (1967) and Les Chansons de Clarisse (1968).

Moreau presided over the Cannes jury twice, in 1975 and 1995. Her honours include an honorary Golden Lion at Venice in 1991, a BAFTA Fellowship in 1996, the European Film Academy's lifetime achievement award in 1997, an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2003, an honorary Golden Bear at Berlin in 2005 and honorary Césars in 1995 and 2008. An officer of the Légion d'honneur and a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, in 2000 she became the first woman elected to the Académie des beaux-arts. She was married to Jean-Louis Richard and later to William Friedkin, and died in Paris on 31 July 2017 at the age of 89.