Actress

Born: January 23 1928;

Died: July 31 2017

JEANNE Moreau, who has died aged 89, was perhaps the best and certainly the most versatile of the French actresses who came to international attention in the late 1950s and 1960s in the movement known as the nouvelle vague; Orson Welles once described her as “the greatest actress in the world”.

Unlike other actresses who made their names during the French New Wave, such as Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau’s appeal was not primarily based on a conventional screen notion of beauty – indeed, she quite often took roles in which she was plain, or even downright unattractive. But she could play beauty and desirability utterly convincingly. François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), one of the key films of the New Wave, is entirely dependent on not only the two titular characters but the audience falling in love with the capricious Catherine, caught between a French and a German suitor in the run-up to the Second World War.

The director’s infatuation with her – even when she is clowning around in a false moustache and cloth cap, chewing a cigar – is obvious in every shot. The screen almost literally lightens with her appearance in a scene. “Through me, François learned about women,” she said in an interview in 1990, “and through him, I learned about cinema.”

She was to bewitch (at least for a while) many of the greatest directors in cinema; Jean Renoir shared Welles’s opinion, calling her “probably the actress I admire most”, and she took leading roles in films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel, Peter Brook, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Carl Foreman, Joseph Losey, John Frankenheimer, Ismail Merchant and Elia Kazan.

Some, like Truffaut, literally fell in love; she had affairs with Louis Malle and Peter Handke, was cited as the co-respondent in Vanessa Redgrave’s divorce from Tony Richardson, and was married for a time to Jean-Louis Richard (who directed her in Mata Hari, Agent H21 and Le Corps de Diane) and William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist and The French Connection). Other lovers included the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the author Henry Miller; the otherwise gay fashion designer Pierre Cardin also fell under her spell.

Her greatness lay in the fact that her characters were complex, fully-realised, believable women – as female characters were, and too often still are, not always portrayed on screen. Some critics thought that Jeanne Moreau’s career not only coincided with the rise of feminism, but greatly contributed to it.

Jeanne Moreau was born on January 23 1928 in Paris, where her father Anatole owned a café. Despite her later reputation as the epitome of French chic and this quintessentially Gallic background, her mother Katherine (née Buckley) was from Oldham in Lancashire, and had come to France as a Tiller girl.

Jeanne’s childhood was spent in Paris and Vichy in central France, where her father’s family lived. At 16, she saw a production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, and determined to become an actress – much to her father’s disapproval.

In her final year at the Conservatoire de Paris, she made her stage debut at the inaugural Avignon Festival in 1947 and, on the strength of her performance there, got a four-year contract with the Comédie-Française, where she quickly became established as one of the company’s leading actresses. She married Jean-Louis Richard, another member of the company, in 1948 and had a son, though they separated in 1951 and divorced in the mid-1960s.

She appeared in several films during her twenties, but was principally a stage actress, appearing to great acclaim in plays by Cocteau, Bernard Shaw and Tennessee Williams. Her performance in the last’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (in a production by Peter Brook) attracted the attention of the young film director Louis Malle, who cast her in her first great screen success, L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in Britain as Lift to the Scaffold, and in America as Frantic, 1958). The film, with a score by Miles Davis, was a vivid reimagining of the film noir genre which came to be seen as one of the New Wave’s early masterpieces.

The following year she appeared in Vadim’s version of Les liasons dangereuses and in Malle’s Les Amants, the sexual content of which was controversial at the time. It won her the Best Actress award at the Venice film festival, but ended her romantic relationship with Malle, who could not stand to see her on screen “as only he had seen me until then”, as she later put it. “I knew that if I played the love scenes just as Louis wanted, he would love me as an actress but hate me as a woman.”

The film had led to Jeanne Moreau being billed as “the new Bardot”, and despite the romantic rift, in 1965 she and Bardot appeared together in another of Malle’s films, Viva Maria! (both their characters were called Maria).

In 1960, she was in Brooks’s Moderato Catabile (usually known in English as Seven Days… Seven Nights) which was written by her friend Marguerite Duras and again cast her as a frustrated housewife, and again won her a Best Actress award, this time at Cannes. The next year she was outstanding in Antonioni’s examination of alienation La Notte, in which she had a stunning long sequence wandering the streets of Milan.

Jules et Jim, which many saw as her most enduring film, and which was a great international success, relied almost entirely on her captivating, magnetic performance, but she was equally, and quite differently, dominant in Losey’s Eva (1962) opposite Stanley Baker. The same year she had strong roles as a gambler in Jacques Demy’s La Baie des Anges and as a seductress in Welles’s version of The Trial. She was memorable, too, in Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), but her parts in mainstream Hollywood pictures at this period were more uneven.

She was wasted in The Victors (Foreman, 1963) and opposite Burt Lancaster in The Train (Frankenheimer, 1964). The Yellow Rolls-Royce (Anthony Asquith, 1964) in which she was Rex Harrison’s wife, was dull while Richardson’s Mademoiselle (1966), with a script by Jean Genet, is a frankly terrible film. But she was a great Doll Tearsheet in Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and effective in Truffaut’s 1968 thriller La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black).

Though her heyday was the 1960s, Jeanne Moreau continued to work for the rest of her life; her most notable later films included The Last Tycoon (Kazan, 1976), Fassbinder’s final film, Querelle (1982), as the assassin’s trainer in La Femme Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990), Wim Wender’s Until the End of Time (1991), and The Proprietor (Merchant, 1996). She was the voiceover for Annaud’s The Lover (as the older version of Jane March, the “sinner from Pinner”) and, like everyone else, had a cameo in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually. For British television, she appeared in a 1985 adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.

She had reasonable success as a singer, releasing several albums and once performing alongside Frank Sinatra, and wrote and directed two films herself (Lumière, 1976 and L’Adolescente, 1979).

She was married three times; first to Jean-Louis Richard, briefly to the Greek actor Thodoros Roubanis (who later married Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill) and for two years (1977-79) to William Friedkin.

She is survived by Jérôme, her son by Richard.

ANDREW MCKIE