French beauty who starred with Errol Flynn and Paul Newman
MICHELINE PRESLE, the French actress, who has died aged 101, enjoyed a brief Hollywood career in films such as Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), a soggy sea yarn directed by her husband William Marshall in which she played a vengeful Creole girl opposite a fading Errol Flynn, who wrote the screenplay.
Small and slender with grey-green eyes, Micheline Presle was Tyrone Power’s love interest in Fritz Lang’s war drama American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950); starred alongside Brigitte Bardot in the romcom The Bride Is Much Too Beautiful (1956); and played a Nobel-winning scientist who asks Paul Newman to have a pretend affair with her in the spy comedy The Prize (1963).
She also starred in Joseph Losey’s British murdermystery Blind Date (1959) as the elegant but ice-cold mistress of a Dutch painter (Hardy Kruger) who is prime suspect of Stanley Baker’s inspector when she is found dead. Blind Date caused a stir by showing the London police in a bad light, but it has since been described as “a daring and sophisticated investigation into British attitudes towards sex, class and the establishment in the late 1950s”.
A decade earlier, she had offended French moralists by playing a married First World War nurse who succumbs to the attentions of a 17-year-old student in
Le diable au corps (Devil in the Flesh, 1947). She was embarrassed to be watched by 60 technicians while filming the sex scenes – which were unusually explicit for the time – but in general, she said, “I like to hear men whistle after me. It’s like hooters on tugboats. One likes to hear them even if one has no intention of making the trip.”
Micheline Nicole Julia Emilienne Chassagne was born on the Left Bank in Paris on August 22 1922, to Robert Chassagne, a French banker who fled to the US to avoid a financial scandal, and his artist wife Julie, née Bachelier.
She was educated at a convent school, and took acting classes with Raymond Rouleau, with whom she appeared in Falbalas (Paris Frills, 1945), about a famous French dressmaker – a film that inspired Jean-paul Gaultier to go into fashion.
Her film debut had been in La Fessée (1937), billed as Micheline Michel. She took the name Presle from her character Jacqueline Presle in Young Girls in Trouble
(1939), which won her the Prix Suzanne Bianchetti (sometimes described as a French Oscar) for most promising young actress.
She continued to make movies during the wartime occupation of Paris before coming to international attention as a prostitute who confronts a Prussian occupier in Boule de Suif
(Angel and Sinner, 1945).
In 1949 she was signed to 20th Century Fox, which changed her name to Prell because Presle was being mispronounced in the US as Pretzel and cast her as a café owner who falls in love with a crooked jockey (John Garfield) in the Ernest Hemingway adaptation Under My Skin (1950). The producer Darryl F Zanuck later billed her as Micheline Prelle to avoid confusion with a shampoo brand.
After The Prize flopped she gave up on Hollywood, but appeared in more than 50 French productions, including Les Misérables
(1995) and as Gérard Depardieu’s mother in I Want to Go Home (1989), for which she won a César.
In 1971 Micheline Presle was one of the signatories of Simone de Beauvoir’s Manifeste de 343, a petition in which 343 prominent women declared that they had undergone an illegal abortion and called for its decriminalisation in France.
She married first, in 1945, Michel Lefort, a tennis player and wine merchant; and secondly, in 1949, the American actor and band leader William Marshall. They divorced in 1954 and Marshall married Ginger Rogers. Her daughter, the actress Tonie Marshall, who directed the rom-com Venus Beauty Institute (1999), in which Micheline Presle made a cameo, died in 2020.