Bafta winner for role in Babette’s Feast
Stephane Audran, actress: b Versailles, France, m (1) JeanLouis Trintignant, (2) Claude Chabrol; 1s; d November 8, 1932; d March 27, 2018, aged 85.
It was said that if Paris was a woman, the city would probably look and sound like Stephane Audran.
The director Gabriel Axel claimed to detect a ‘‘natural Parisian way of doing things’’ in her every movement, from how she walked to how she opened a door. The British media simply dubbed her ‘‘the thinking Englishman’s favourite French crumpet’’.
Axel cast her in the title role of Babette’s Feast. Her luminous performance as the French cook who arrives in 19th-century Denmark fleeing political turmoil in Paris, helped the picture to win an Oscar for the best foreign language film in 1988; it also secured her a Bafta as best actress.
It was a role for which she was doubly suited because she claimed that, if she had not become an actress, she would have been a cook, like Babette. ‘‘If I could only act the way I make salad dressing,’’ she once observed.
Other audiences who did not watch French films knew her best as Cara, the mistress of Lord Marchmain, played by Laurence Olivier, in the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Yet her real forte lay in playing glacially self-possessed and often adulterous bourgeois French women.
Her roles included two dozen pictures directed by her husband, Claude Chabrol, made before, during and after their marriage. There was also a memorable performance as a wealthy society hostess in Luis Bunuel’s surreal 1972 Oscar-winning picture Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie).
Her relationship with Bunuel, who was in his seventies at the time, was characteristically intense. She found him ‘‘demanding’’ and ‘‘unnerving’’ yet she was transfixed by him. ‘‘If I had met him during the war, he could have made me turn my family in to the Nazis,’’ she admitted. ‘‘He could do whatever he wanted. I was fascinated by him and I’d have done anything he told me to. It was scary.’’
It was also symptomatic of the way her personal and professional lives became inextricably linked as she emerged as one of the most potent French stars of her generation. Events off-screen during the making of her husband’s films were often as emotionally charged as the fictional scenes she played on the set.
‘‘Working together is a nightmare," Chabrol said. ‘‘It’s most difficult when we get home. She keeps asking why I let her play a part the way I did. Each time I say I’ll never work with her again.’’
In Chabrol’s award-winning 1968 film Les Biches (The Does) she played a rich and beautiful Parisian woman involved in a bisexual menage a trois. It was a dazzling performance, but it cannot have been easy with her second husband directing her erotic scenes with her co-star JeanLouis Trintignant, who had been her first husband until he left her for Brigitte Bardot.
On another occasion Chabrol was directing her in the film Bluebeard when Carlo Ponti, the producer (and husband of Sophia Loren), was unimpressed by her performance. ‘‘Who’s that slut who’s playing Fernande?’’ he demanded, unaware that she was engaged to the director and was carrying his child. Chabrol slapped him in the face and screamed: ‘‘That’s my woman!’’
There was also off-screen drama towards the end of their marriage. During the shooting of Ten Days’ Wonder in 1971 Audran was unable to attend her husband’s birthday dinner and jokingly suggested that he should ‘‘jump on’’ Aurore Pajot, the film’s script supervisor. He did, and after Chabrol divorced Audran, Pajot became his third wife.
Audran took the divorce hard, particularly after Chabrol announced that he would continue to cast her in his films because he was "more interested in her as an actress than a wife".
She believed she owed him everything. ‘‘Acting did not come naturally to me,’’ she said. ‘‘My voice was wrong. I could not move around. I tried to improve with lessons. Then I was lucky enough to meet Chabrol.’’
He not only taught her to act, she gushed, but helped her "to understand life". Anxious and fragile by nature, she suffered a psychosomatic crisis, complaining of fainting fits, memory loss, inability to concentrate and chronic tiredness following their divorce.
After unsuccessfully trying conventional remedies, she turned to Chinese medicine, which enabled her to find her ‘‘lost energy’’. She chronicled her researches in a book called Une autre facon de vivre (Another Way of Life).
She was born Colette Suzanne Jeannine Dacheville in Versailles in 1932. Her father, Corneille Dacheville, a doctor, died when she was six. Her mother, Jeanne, was a teacher and, having lost her first child and husband, was obsessed with her daughter’s health. She treated her with hot water packs and thermal baths for the renal colic that plagued her throughout her childhood.
The timid teacher disapproved of her daughter’s early playacting –Audran admitted that in her loneliness she invented families for herself in her head — and was set against her becoming an actress. ‘‘She was afraid of everything so she was afraid of me becoming an actress – no security like the civil service,’’ Audran said.
Nonetheless, Audran signed up for acting classes, where she met and married Trintignant, a fellow student. After a brief, undistinguished career on the stage, she made her screen debut in 1957 and met Chabrol the next year.
She came to attention as a seductress in a black dress in his 1959 film Les Cousins, which elevated Chabrol to the New Wave pantheon alongside Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut.
Over the next 30 years they became one of the most prolific and captivating director-and-muse pairings in cinematic history. In what seemed to be a private joke between them, she played adulterous or betrayed women called Helene in many of his films.
Her French accent limited her ability to work in Hollywood and in later years, like many actresses, she complained about the paucity of suitable parts for mature women. ‘‘After a certain age the only parts are mad women or saintly mothers who aren’t really part of the action,’’ she said. She blamed the men who ran the movie industry. ‘‘For them women over 40 aren’t sexual objects.’’
A rare Hollywood invitation came in 1996 when she played Jean-Claude Van Damme’s mother in the action film Maximum Risk. It helped that Van Damme was playing a French cop and her heavily accented English was an advantage rather than an obstacle.
It was a measure of her status as one of the most revered icons of French cinema that her death was announced by Francoise Nyssen, the culture minister, who declared that ‘‘her presence, her elegance and her inimitable voice remain and resonate’’.
‘‘If I had met him during the war, he could have made me turn my family in to the Nazis.’’ Audran on the director Luis Bunuel