Jeanne Moreau, the French femme fatale who starred in the romantic drama “Jules and Jim” and left an indelible mark on the country’s New Wave movement, has died in Paris at age 89.
The smoky-voiced actress worked with most of the world’s pre-eminent directors in the first few decades after World War II, including Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders.
Wells once described the feminist icon and trailblazer for liberated women as “the best actress in the world,” Agence France-Press reported.
Born in Paris 1928 to an English chorus girl and a French restaurateur, the free spirit defied her father by joining the Paris conservatoire at age 18. Two years later, she was accepted to the elite Comedie Francaise theatre troupe.
Her breakthrough came in 1958 when she starred in two films for director Louis Malle that challenged the moral norms of the times.
She played a criminal in 1958’s “Lift to the Scaffold,” imbued by the iconic jazz score by Miles Davis, and then rankled sensibilities that same year in “The Lovers,” in which she played murderous lover Florence Carala.
In 1960, she won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for “Seven Days … Seven Nights.”
But it was her tomboy playfulness in “Jules and Jim” that launched Moreau into international stardom.
Directed by François Truffaut, the stylish 1962 film was set during the World War I and depicted a ménage a trois between Moreau’s character, Catherine, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre).
“Every time I picture her in the distance I see her reading not a newspaper but a book, because Jeanne Moreau doesn’t suggest flirtation but love,” Truffaut said.
Moreau almost appeared in another landmark 1960s role – Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate,” with Dustin Hoffman, but she turned down the part offered by director Mike Nichols.
Instead, she reunited with Truffaut for 1968’s “The Bride Wore Black,” an homage to Alfred Hitchcock.
Leading tributes to Moreau, French President Emmanuel Macron said she had “embodied cinema” and she was a free spirit who “always rebelled against the established order,” AFP reported.
Fellow French screen legend Brigitte Bardot said: “Jeanne was a beautiful, intelligent, hugely seductive woman with a voice and a personality that made her an actress with so many sides. I am very sad today.”
In one profile, Britain’s Guardian newspaper captured a facet of Moreau that set her apart from other stars of the ’60s, including Bardot.
“While Bardot did the dippy blonde sex bomb thing, Moreau was as sharp as cold air and mercilessly clever,” the newspaper said of her.
She was briefly married to William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of “The Exorcist,” and had a five-year relationship with designer Pierre Cardin.
The notoriously difficult interviewee responded with characteristic candor when asked if she ever felt nostalgic for the French New Wave.
“Nostalgia for what? Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place. And I think, my God, look at them! They’re dead before they die. That’s a terrible risk. Living is risking,” she said, The Guardian reported.
Macron celebrated a “spark in her eye that defied reverence and was an invitation to insolence, to liberty, to this whirlpool of life that she loved so much, and that she made us love.”
With Post Wires