French actress in golden age of Hollywood
Micheline Presle was still a convent-educated ingenue in her early twenties when she caused a scandal by playing a married First World War nurse who has an affair with a 17-year-old student while her husband is fighting on the Western Front.
The Devil in the Flesh (1947) featured scenes considered so explicit that when the film was shown at the Brussels film festival the French ambassador left in protest. Having been banned by the censors for six years, the film was finally released in Britain with an X rating. Inevitably, the furore only served to make it more popular in certain quarters. It was critically acclaimed, however, and it generated much discussion about changing values after the war. It also ultimately served as Presle’s passport to Hollywood.
The film demonstrated her virtuosity for showing a range of emotions with minimal changes to her physiognomy – the mesmeric grey-green eyes that could morph from sad to minxy coquettish in a blink; and a small pout that would transform into an extraordinarily large smile.
Darryl F Zanuck, the producer at 20th Century Fox, was not accustomed to pandering to the demands of young actresses, as exemplified by his contemptuous treatment of a young Marilyn Monroe, whom he had signed to the studio in 1946. The Hollywood svengali changed the young French actress’ name to Prell because he thought that Presle sounded too similar to pretzel – and he kept her away from the camera for a year while he worked on her look and on improving her English.
Yet even he was sufficiently impressed to make concessions to Presle during their negotiations. Through a plume of cigar smoke, he promised that she would not be cast as vacuous “eye candy”, but would play serious roles.
She signed for two films a year, but would also be allowed to return to France to make a film. Her contract even stipulated that she could take time off each year to work on her pet project: a biopic of the pioneering French actress Sarah Bernhardt, for which she had bought the film rights.
Presle immediately got a role she wanted (“a girl with lots of troubles”) as a cafe owner who falls in love with a crooked jockey played by John Garfield in Jean Negulesco’s Under My Skin (1950), based on an Ernest Hemingway short story.
There may have been predictable windswept embraces with Tyrone Power in American Guerilla in the Philippines (1950), but there was also plenty of scope to show her subtlety as an ex-pat resistance fighter in the Japanese-occupied territory who falls in love with an American sailor stranded there after her Filipino husband is beaten to death by the Japanese.
Then she returned to France to star opposite Errol Flynn (who wrote the script) in Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951), directed by the American actor William Marshall, who became her second husband (she had divorced her first, the French tennis player Michel Lefort, in 1950). She and Marshall would have a daughter, Tonie.
Presle’s work in Hollywood demonstrated her skill as an actress, not to mention her luminescence and glamour, but none of the films made her a household name. After divorcing Marshall and returning to France in 1954 she declared that her experience in Hollywood had been “a failure on a sentimental level and also on a professional level”.
She had been gone for six years, but even in that time a revolution had begun in French film-making and there appeared to be no room for her in the French New Wave.
“I didn’t exist any more,” she later told an interviewer with a light frankness that conveyed that she did not feel in the least bit sorry for herself. Presle did, however, remind British audiences of her talents in the film Blind Date, a murder-mystery directed by Joseph Losey in which she plays Jacqueline Costeau, the upper-class mistress of a young Dutch painter (Hardy Kruger) in London, who is accused of her murder after she is found dead. The Radio Times Film Guide called it a “daring and sophisticated investigation into British attitudes towards sex, class and the establishment in the late 1950s”.
Micheline Nicole Julia Emilienne Chassagne was born on the Left Bank in Paris in 1922. Her father, Robert Chassagne, was a banker who fled to the US because of a financial scandal. Her mother, Julie Bachelier, was an actress and the child wanted to be one from an early age. She took acting lessons as a teenager with the Belgian actor Raymond Rouleau. In 1937 she first made her mark in Jeunes Filles en Detresse, (Young Girls in Distress) directed by GW Pabst. “I arrived furious because I had a cold and my mother had given me a muffler,” she recalled. “Seeing me in such a bad mood, he burst out laughing. He told me I would have a role. He did better: he let me choose between two characters which one I would prefer. It was really extraordinary.”
She would later appear with her mentor Rouleau in the 1945 film Paris Frills, in which she plays a young woman who falls in love with her fiance’s best friend on a trip to the French capital. That year she also starred in Boule de Suif (released in English as Angel and Sinner), based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, in which she played a prostitute during the Franco-Prussian War.
By the end of the Second World War she was a star in the firmament of rising young actresses – along with Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan – whose reputations were spreading beyond French shores.
Presle returned to Hollywood in 1963 to make the romantic thriller The Prize, with Paul Newman. By now she was too old for the leading role, which went to the German actress Elke Sommer, while Presle played one half of a scientific Nobel prize-winning couple.
Her daughter Tonie Marshall, who predeceased her, was a film-maker. Presle appeared in her movie Venus Beauty Institute (1999), which won France’s Cesar Award for best film.
While Presle had perhaps not quite achieved the recognition that her acting talents deserved, she had appeared in more than 150 films and a gallic shrug said that she could not complain.
– The Times