Legendary French actress Danielle Darrieux dies at 100
PARIS: Danielle Darrieux, one of France’s greatest and most enduring stars despite her wartime collaboration with the Germans, has died aged 100 at her home near Paris, her partner said Thursday.
The actress who charmed the world in Max Ophuls’ romantic 1953 masterpiece “The Earrings of Madame de” became unwell “recently after a little fall,” Jacques Jenvrin told AFP.
With her smoldering good looks and sulky pout, Darrieux became a huge international star in the 1930s, playing opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr in the Hollywood romance “The Rage of Paris” in 1938.
But her decision to keep working after the Nazis occupied France, and to act in movies made by the studio set up by their propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, saw her branded as a collaborationist.
However, Darrieux later said that she was forced to take part in a notorious publicity tour to Berlin in 1942 so she could free her husband, the playboy and diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa, who had been arrested by the Nazis as a spy.
She left the German-backed studio after he was released and went into hiding under a false name.
Three years after the war ended she returned to great acclaim in a string of striking roles in Ophuls’ brilliant “La Ronde” and “Madame de” — both later nominated for Oscars — and played the Queen of Spain in Jean Cocteau’s “Ruy Blas.”
She was back in Hollywood in 1952 starring opposite James Mason in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Oscar-nominated World War II spy thriller “5 Fingers.”
And whatever doubts that lingered about her wartime activities were brushed aside by her searing performance in the title role of “Marie-Octobre,” a 1959 thriller about the survivors of a French Resistance network who try to discover who betrayed their murdered leader.
Beyond her hypnotic beauty, it was Darrieux’s captivating mix of mischief and refinement that had audiences and a long line of lovers falling at her feet.