Influential French actress
Born: May 14, 1947;
Died: October 5, 2017
ANNE Wiazemsky, who has died of cancer aged 70, charmed some of Europe’s greatest directors, including Robert Bresson, who sacked another actress to give her the starring role in his masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), and Jean-Luc Godard, who married her and cast her in several films.
Godard twice cast her as a revolutionary – which was ironic as Wiazemsky came from one of the oldest royal families in Europe.
Her father Yvan Wiazemsky was a Russian prince. He belonged to the Rurikid family who ruled Russia before the Romanov dynasty took over in the 17th century.
Her mother’s family were equally distinguished. Her maternal grandfather was the Nobel Prize-winning French writer Francois Mauriac and after giving up acting Wiazemsky also enjoyed success as a writer.
One of her most recent books, Un An Apres (2015) has just been turned into a film, entitled Redoubtable, by Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning director of The Artist (2011). It is set against the backdrop of civil unrest in France in 1968, with Stacy Martin as Wiazemsky and Louis Garrel as Godard.
Wiazemsky was not keen on the idea of a film version but was persuaded when Hazanavicius said he wanted to play up the comedy. It was a gamble, as Godard and Wiazemsky were regarded as earnest intellectuals at the time.
“In that moment, she decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea,” said Hazanavicius. “She said, ‘I think it was a funny relationship and a funny time.’” The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and Wiazemsky was there.
Her father had settled in France after fleeing the Russian Revolution and he served as a diplomat. Wiazemsky was born in Berlin in 1947 and lived in various capital cities where her father was posted.
She was 17 when she met Bresson through a mutual friend. She had no professional acting experience, but Bresson was enchanted by her freshness and naturalism, which he thought would be perfect for the lead in his new film Au Hasard Balthazar.
The film focuses on a country girl, her relationship with the donkey of the title and with the people of the local village. He got rid of the actress to whom he had just promised the role and hired Wiazemsky instead.
“When I first met him, I was very much impressed and fell very much under his charm,'' she said in an interview with the New York Times in 2003. “Even if he was an older man (he was in his sixties at this point), he was really very, very handsome.”
However, a few years after giving that interview, Wiazemsky revealed in her memoir Jeune Fille (2007) that there had been a darker side to the relationship. She claimed Bresson, who died in 1999, had continually made unwelcome advances towards her. She slept with a member of the crew, effectively to deflect his attention.
Jean-Luc Godard, one of the key figures of the Nouvelle Vague, cast her as a Maoist revolutionary in La Chinoise (1967) and they married shortly before the film came out. It tapped into the prevailing mood and some have suggested it helped shape it. Within the year Paris was gripped by student riots and university occupations.
Wiazemsky played another revolutionary in Sympathy for the Devil (1968), which intercut the Rolling Stones with seemingly unrelated footage of Black Panthers and political messages. But the marriage did not last and they eventually divorced.
She played the young woman seduced by Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) and also appeared in his bizarre drama Pigsty (1969). She continued to act in films and occasionally television until the late 1980s, after which she focused mainly on writing.
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