Moreau, free spirited star of French cinema, is dead at 89

Jeanne Moreau, one of French cinema’s biggest stars of the last 60 years, has died at the age of 89.

She is probably best known for her role in Francois Truffaut’s 1962 new wave film Jules et Jim and won a number of awards including the best actress prize at Cannes for Moderato Cantabile in 1960.

She also worked with Orson Welles on several films and won a Bafta for best foreign actress for Viva Maria! in 1967.

Moreau, pictured below, was born in 1928, the daughter of a French restaurateur and a dancer from Oldham, Lancashire. Despite her father’s disapproval, she pursued acting and got her break in the 1957 films Lift to the Scaffold and The Lovers.

She famously turned down Mike nichols’ invitation to play Mrs Robinson in The Graduate – a role taken by anne Bancroft – and instead reunited with Truffaut for 1968’s The Bride Wore Black.

Once described by Welles as ‘ the best actress in the world’, she was also a feminist icon, a trailblazer for liberated women at a time when cinema was slowly waking up to feminism.

She was found dead at her home in Paris. French president emmanuel Macron said Miss Moreau had ‘embodied cinema’ and was a free spirit who ‘always rebelled against the established order’.

It was that sparky rebel spirit that also had some of the world’s greatest directors beating a path to her door, including Welles for his Chimes at Midnight, Michelangelo antonioni for La notte and Luis Bunuel for his 1964 film Diary of a Chambermaid.

In 1958 she ruffled feathers in The Lovers, her first excursion into the sexual frankness that marked later work.

Her occasional apperances in englishlanguage cinema included Carl Foreman’s The Victors and John Frankenheimer’s The Train.

She was married twice and had one son, Jerome, from her first marriage to JeanLouis Richard, an actor and director.