Jeanne Moreau, star of Jules et Jim, dies aged 89 Read more

Jeanne Moreau is probably best known for a movie in which she was perhaps most atypically cast – as Catherine, the entrancing free spirit who has ensnared two men in François Truffaut’s sensational hit Jules et Jim (1962). But in that movie she was no mere ingenue. Moreau was 35 years old, an established star of the French stage and hardly a newcomer to movies. She had a worldly intelligence and sensuality in Jules et Jim that outranked her suitors. It was a clue to the potency and poignancy of her part in that love triangle.

Maybe the most startling part of the film is her showpiece rendition of the song Le Tourbillon De La Vie (The Whirl of Life), about a captivating woman. Yet Moreau’s singing voice is no smoky drawl, or sensual whisper. She sings it with an enigmatically pleasant, birdlike chirrup, like a well-mannered schoolgirl called upon to perform for dinner guests or indeed a schoolteacher surrounded by a semi-circle of cross-legged children whom she expects to join in with the chorus. But the lyrics themselves are darkly portentous: “Elle avait des yeux, des yeux d’opale / Qui me fascinaient, qui me fascinaient / Y avait l’ovale de son visage / De femme fatale qui m’fut fatale.” (“She had eyes, eyes like opal / That fascinated me, that fascinated me / The oval of her pale face / Of a femme fatale who was fatal to me.”)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Her acting outranked her suitors … Moreau in Jules et Jim. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Les Films

Moreau’s own face was more round than oval, but her beauty always had a stunningly fatale quality, perhaps most obviously in the dark circles under her eyes. She was certainly, for me, more vivid in Jules et Jim than, say, Anna Karina in Godard’s Bande à Part in 1964. Her beauty is more restless, more piercing, more discriminating and in a way more detached. She always looks as if she could walk out of the screen, and away into some other story. And in fact that questing intelligence found expression also as a director: she made two features herself, Lumiere in 1976 – a rather studied tale of four actresses – and the coming-of-age story L’Adolescente, in 1978.

Moreau was often cast in straightforwardly erotic roles, for middleweight commercial movies of the period, such as her devastating seducer in Joseph Losey’s Eve with Stanley Baker in that same year, 1962, or as the more carefree outlaw in Marcel Ophuls’s Riviera comedy Banana Peel opposite a dapper Jean-Paul Belmondo, in 1963. Her relationship with Belmondo is far more powerful in Peter Brook’s Seven Days … Seven Nights (1960) which won Moreau the best actress prize at Cannes and consolidated her star status.

But her intelligence, her air of languor, of discontent, all combined to make her something more disquieting than could be properly served by movies like this, popular though they were. Perhaps it was Louis Malle who contrived to make her a movie star in his debut noir classic Lift to the Scaffold (1958) and yet even here Moreau is the older woman, the married schemer who has a murderous plan to bring riches to herself and her equally ruthless lover, which goes terribly wrong, in an era when capital punishment – the scaffold – is of course still very much on the statute book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! Photograph: Allstar/United Artists

Michelangelo Antonioni found something in Jeanne Moreau which the French did not, or not quite: he isolated that air of sadness and ennui, which other directors found it necessary to mix together with gaiety or eroticism. In his early masterpiece of gloom, La Notte, or The Night, in 1961, Antonioni cast her as Lidia, the fashionable wife of an equally fashionable author, played by Marcello Mastroianni. After visiting a sick friend in hospital, the couple attend a supercool party attended by everyone who is anyone, but who are all secretly discontented and on the edge of pure surfeit and existential nausea. Moreau is very much not the dark erotic temptress in this movie – that part goes to Monica Vitti, who tries to seduce her husband. But her performance intuits everything in the air: all the glinting atoms of revulsion, of self-reproach, of thwarted sensuality and frustrated, congealed love. It is not really a starring role, and yet it is the clue to why Moreau was a star and such a force in French and European cinema. Years later, in his Beyond the Clouds (1995), co-directed with Wim Wenders, Antonioni brought Moreau back in the same role, as an old woman, still married to the elderly Mastroianni, and here mocking his elderly attempts at amateur painting. Her shrewd and unimpressed sense of the world has, it seems, survived.

For pure eroticism and the darkest erotic comedy, Jeanne Moreau found her acting high point in Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964, as Celestine, the domestic who uses her own manipulative sexuality to shape and control the perversion and downright weirdness which is happening all around her.

Jeanne Moreau obituary Read more

Interestingly, Orson Welles was a director who responded to the cerebral intensity and force of Moreau, though perhaps could not quite find a starring role in his great movies. She was a magnetic Fräulein Burstner in his Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962) and an interesting, though perhaps miscast Doll Tearsheet in his great Shakespearian creation Falstaff in 1965. Welles gave Moreau more to do in his television play The Immortal Story (1968), based on the Karen Blixen story.

Moreau’s charisma, intelligence, sexuality and star quality created a new space in postwar French cinema for female stars who were not merely beautiful but commandingly intelligent and complex, and in her way made possible the very different careers of Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard and Isabelle Huppert. To call her an icon would be to make her too passive and inert. She was rather a great screen actor.

• This article was amended on 1 August 2017. An earlier version said a character played by Jeanne Moreau in Lift to the Scaffold planned to bring riches to her ruthless husband. This has been corrected to lover.

