Anne Wiazemsky
Actress who was the wife and muse of Jean-luc Godard and later became a successful novelist
ANNE WIAZEMSKY, the actress and writer, who has died aged 70, launched her career aged 18 with an unforgettably moving performance in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) – a powerful allegory of suffering and redemption centred on an eponymous donkey – as a naive country girl whose life and fortunes mirror those of the mistreated beast of burden which she loves.
The film won the Special Jury Prize at Venice and its young female star caught the attention of the director Jean-luc Godard, the enfant terrible of the French New Wave. Though Anne was nearly 20 years his junior, they married in 1967 after his divorce from his first wife.
An avowed Maoist, Anne Wiazemsky connected him to student radicalism, influencing the more radical turn of such works as Masculin Feminin (1966) and 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (1966). In 1967, aged 19, she starred in his terrifying political comedy La Chinoise (1967), as Veronique, a Sorbonne-educated young woman who insists that exams are a form of racism and vows to close the universities as she theorises her way into a (botched) act of domestic terrorism. She also had small parts in Godard’s black comedy Weekend, an allegory of social and moral breakdown centred on an unhappy couple who get stuck in a traffic jam on the way to a romantic getaway, while in Sympathy for the Devil (One
Plus One) in 1968, the film that marked the director’s descent into years of churning out humourless agitprop, she was Eve Democracy, a personification of the political system who, no matter what she is asked, always answers “yes” or “no”.
Although Anne Wiazemsky’s marriage to Godard was dissolved in 1979, it had effectively ended by 1970. Later on, she drew on their relationship in two novels, Une Année Studieuse (2012) and Un An après (2015), the latter providing the basis for Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable, released earlier this year and set during the turbulent événements of May 1968, starring Louis Garrel as Godard and Stacy Martin as Anne.
Anne Wiazemsky was born on May 14 1947 in Berlin. Her father, Yvan, was a Russian prince who had fled after the 1917 Revolution and become a French diplomat. Her mother, Claire, was the daughter of François Mauriac, the novelist and playwright who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. Anne spent her early years abroad before returning, in 1962, to Paris, where she finished her schooling at the École Sainte Marie de Passy.
She was 17 when she met Robert Bresson, then in his 60s, shortly after the death of her father. Though she had no professional acting experience, he was immediately smitten and sacked the actress he had cast as Marie in Au hasard Balthazar, giving the role to Anne instead.
Although she regarded Bresson as her “artistic father” it soon became clear that his attitude to his young protégée was more than merely paternal. “For a month and a half, we lived under the same roof with adjoining bedrooms and he never let me out of his sight,” she recalled in a later memoir, Jeune Fille (2007). “At first, he would content himself by holding my arm, or stroking my cheek. But then came the disagreeable moment when he would try to kiss me … I would push him away and he wouldn’t insist, but he looked so unhappy that I always felt guilty.”
Confused by his attentions, she ended up losing her virginity to a member of the film crew, which, she claimed, gave her the courage to fend off Bresson’s advances – though not, evidently, those of Godard, who, by her account, was equally possessive. Godard soon outstripped her in revolutionary fervour and they drifted apart, though after their separation she appeared with Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in Tout Va Bien (1972), which Godard co-directed.
Her other credits included Pasolini’s art-house film Theorem (1969), in which a mysterious stranger (Terence Stamp) seduces every member of a family, male and female, including Anne Wiazemsky’s timid and overprotected daughter. In 1973, she played the French author George Sand in Michele Rosier’s biopic George Who?
She continued to act in films until the late 1980s when she turned her attention to writing, becoming the author of several memoirs and more than a dozen critically acclaimed novels of which Canines (1993) won the Prix Goncourt, Hymnes à l’amour (1996) the Prix Maurice Genevoix and Une poignée de gens (1998) the Grand Prix du roman de l’académie française.
Anne Wiazemsky, born May 14 1947, died October 5 2017