French actress was femme fatale
JEANNE MOREAU
PARIS — French actress Jeanne Moreau, the smokyvoiced femme fatale of the French New Wave who starred in Francois Truffaut’s love-triangle film “Jules and Jim” and was called by some the French Bette Davis, has died at 89.
Outspoken, sensual, provocative and acting well into her 80s, Moreau was among France’s most-recognized performers. In a statement, President Emmanuel Macron said Moreau 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.”
The president’s office and Moreau’s agent announced her death Monday without providing a cause.
Moreau starred in her first feature film in 1949 and last appeared in the 2015 comedy “My Friends’ Talent.” She broke through in 1958 with Louis Malle’s “Les Amants,” or “The Lovers,” a version of “Madame Bovary” that included a scene so erotic that the French government nearly banned it.
Moreau’s performance as Catherine in Truffaut’s 1962 “Jules and Jim,” in which she played the love interest in a romance about two friends vying for the same woman, was groundbreaking. She also worked with Truffaut on the Hitchcock-inspired thriller “The Bride Wore Black.”
Off screen, she had many lovers. Even romantic rivals paid tribute, among them Vanessa Redgrave, whose then-husband, filmmaker Tony Richardson, had an affair with Moreau in the 1960s.
“Any man who didn’t love Jeanne Moreau would have to be blind and deaf,” Redgrave said in 1995.
Moreau starred in more than 100 films, recorded albums, won an honorary Oscar in 1998 for lifetime achievement and twice presided over the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.
She had a son, Jerome, in 1949 from her first marriage, to Jean-Louis Richard. She had a brief marriage in the 1970s to William Friedkin, the Oscarwinning director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.”