Award-winning French actress Jeanne Moreau died on Monday at age 89. The husky-voiced cinema star had a seven-decade career that included work with some of the world’s most acclaimed directors, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, Peter Brook, Wim Wenders, and François Truffaut. She is perhaps best known for her role as Catherine in Truffaut’s iconic French New Wave film Jules and Jim.
The French president’s office announced her death in a statement on Monday, in which President Emmanuel Macron said that Moreau “embodied cinema” and epitomized her art like few others, praising her for her enormous talent and breadth of interest in roles. “That was her freedom . . . always rebellious against the established order,” Macron said, adding that she had 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.”
Outspoken and politically active—she once told The New York Times that “the cliché is that life is a mountain. . . . You go up, reach the top, and then go down. To me, life is going up until you are burned by flames”—Moreau starred in more than 100 films, recorded albums, and worked well into her 80s. She won a best actress César for The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea in 1992, an honorary Oscar in 1998 for lifetime achievement, and various other cinema and theater awards. She twice presided over the main competition jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Welles, who worked with her on films including Chimes at Midnight and his adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, described her as the greatest actress in the world. Patti Smith once penned a tribute to the actress for High Times magazine, in which she wrote, “If I turn out like Jeanne Moreau when I grow up, I couldn’t ask for anything more. She’s so self-contained. She could start a forest fire . . . I’d like Jeanne Moreau to cut me down to size, ’cuz in the process of being cut down to size by her I’d really start to grow. She’s great. Anna Magnani was great. Piaf was great. They were so much emotion. Like Janis Joplin—she had so much, too—but Jeanne Moreau, she’s got brains. It’s like she’s got an intellect in her movement.”
Moreau was briefly married to William Friedkin, the Oscar-winning director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, and had a high-profile, five-year relationship with designer Pierre Cardin, described by both as a “true love,” though they were never married.
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In an interview with The New York Times in 1989, Moreau said: “I work more now because at this time of my life, I am not disturbed from my aim by outside pressures such as family, passionate relationships, dealing with who am I—those complications when one is searching for one’s self. I have no doubt who I am.”