I MARRIED JEANNE Moreau in 1977 at a town hall in Paris. Moreau was one of the most revered actresses of her generation, and we were attended by a notable group: Jacques Chirac, the city’s soon-to-be mayor, spoke, and our witnesses were the film director Alain Resnais, who had introduced me to Jeanne, and his wife, Florence Malraux, daughter of the writer André Malraux.

After sips of Champagne and a brief ceremony, of which I did not comprehend one word, Jeanne and I took a long walk in the Tuileries Garden accompanied by a cluster of paparazzi. It was my first marriage, her second. I’ve seen pictures of myself on our wedding day and I appear shell-shocked and confused. That first year we spent the summer at her chateau in La Garde-Freinet, a medieval village, on 150 acres of farmland in the hills behind St.-Tropez. I had no prospect of work. My most recent film, “Sorcerer,” which I thought to be my best, had been rejected by critics and audiences. I drifted into the sedentary life of the French countryside, begun with long morning walks into the village for a coffee and croissant. The cafe owner and the patrons were dismissive and a large graffiti on the stone wall leading to town read: “Parisians Go Home.” I could only imagine how they felt about Americans.

In the evenings, after dinner, Jeanne would read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“In Search of Lost Time”). She would begin reading to me in French, then translate it into English. Gradually, I became caught up in the novel’s language, its complex structure and the intertwined lives of the many characters. After two years, Jeanne and I realized we were culturally displaced in each other’s worlds. Our marriage ended, but not my love for Proust. I continued to read the novel, often with difficulty, until the revelation of its final volume. Then I would make time every day to go over parts of it again, sometimes only certain passages, like a favored piece of recorded music.

This went on for 10 years, in which I devoured every biography and essay about Proust I could find and became familiar with his life, which seemed to closely parallel his work. It was a solitary pursuit. The only other person I knew in Hollywood who appreciated the novel was the actor Louis Jourdan, who lived with his wife of many years in Beverly Hills in a single-level house surrounded by books, recordings and antiques. Louis was always cast as an archetypal French lover but his passions were literature and music. I got to know him well in his later years. I would visit him two or three days a week. When he died in 2015, he left me his annotated copy of Jean-Yves Tadie’s definitive biography of Proust, with Louis’s handwritten notes and observations on every page.