January 16, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Actress Jeanne Moreau, who made her name in the French ÒNew WaveÓ, turns 80
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, January 16, Graphic News:  Independent, free-spirited and known for her raw beauty -- she has never liked make-up -- Jeanne Moreau is on record as saying: ÒSometimes the directors were afraid of what they brought out of meÓ. And she has worked with the best of them, including Louis Malle, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Elia Kazan and Orson Welles, the latter describing her as Òthe greatest actress in the worldÓ. 

As she celebrates her 80th birthday on January 23, Moreau can look back on a career which has spanned over 100 films, including directing, as well as many acclaimed stage performances and success as a singer, too. It is a life which seems to have compromised little and which flourished at a time when France was embracing feminism and the cinema was examining new, unconventional roles for women. In perhaps her best-known film, TruffautÕs Jules et Jim (1962), Moreau played the lover of two men, unable to choose between them. Manipulating and, ultimately, self-destructive, MoreauÕs portrayal of the tempestuous Catherine brought her international recognition. 

It was not the first time Moreau had been cast as a sexually uninhibited woman. In 1958 she appeared in the Louis Malle film, Les Amants (The Lovers), which tells the story of a bored housewife who throws herself into an affair with a stranger. For its time, the movie, with its erotic scenes and scandalous plot, proved a tricky one for the censors in the United States when it was released there the following year. It was the second film Moreau had made with Malle, with whom she had a relationship off-screen; the murder mystery, Ascenseur pour l'echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold), was their first collaboration and is regarded as MoreauÕs breakthrough in cinema.

The daughter of an English mother, who went to Paris as a dancer with the Tiller Girls, and a French father, who ran a restaurant there, Jeanne Moreau was born in the French capital in 1928 and was still a child when her parents divorced. She lived through the Nazi occupation of Paris and went on to study drama at the Conservatoire, afterwards joining the highly regarded Comedie-Francaise when she was just 20. Four years later she transferred to the Theatre Nationale Populaire, known for its more experimental approach.

Closely associated with fellow Òsex symbolÓ Brigitte Bardot, Moreau appeared with Bardot in another Louis Malle film, Viva Maria! (1965) and in the following decades went on to work with a new generation of French film-makers, such as Bertrand Blier, Luc Besson and Wim Wenders, long after the New Wave was over. Her longevity in the cinema contrasts with others of her era who did not move on successfully in an ever-changing industry. In 2001 she portrayed her close friend, the director and writer Marguerite Duras, in the highly acclaimed biopic, Cet amour-la. She has twice been president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

Known for her active involvement in politics, Moreau was one of many personalities from the French film world who signed a petition in support of civil disobedience in 1997, when the French government was considering introducing what many saw as a xenophobic immigration law. 
     
Married three times, her son Jerome -- her only child, from her first marriage to Jean-Louis Richard -- is an artist.
/ENDS