Moreau, Jeanne

Moreau, Jeanne (1928- ), French theatre and film actress. Moreau was born in Paris and attended lectures at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique. From 1948 to 1952 she was in the Comédie-Française as a pensionnaire, the first category of membership granted by this French national theatre. Here she received formal training and was introduced to the great classics, an important element in her versatile range. Among her unforgettable theatre performances are roles in Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, Le Prince de Hambourg by H. von Kleist, with Gérard Philipe, at the Théâtre National Populaire (1953), La Chevauchée sur le Lac de Constance by Peter Handke in 1973, and in Le Recit de la Servante Zerline (1986), by Hermann Broch, for which she received several awards.

As a film star, she appeared in Touchez-pas au Grisbi (Don’t Touch the Loot) by Jacques Becker, in 1953; Jacques Dréville then chose her to interpret La Reine Margot in 1954, a role perfectly suited to her sensual presence. Over the next few years she made two films with the director Louis Malle, Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud (1957; Lift to the Scaffold) and Les Amants (1958; The Lovers), which showed how advanced an actress she could be. She starred in other offbeat films, including La Notte (The Night) by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1961, Jules et Jim by François Truffaut in 1962, Eva (Eve), which is probably the most intriguing film by Joseph Losey, and, in the same year, Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (1964; Diary of a Chambermaid), a screen adaptation by Luis Buñuel of the novel by Octave Mirbeau.

Moreau has directed three films: Lumière (1976), L’Adolescente (1979), and Lillian Gish (1984), a documentary about the great star of the silent era. More recently, she starred in The Proprietor (1996), in the part of a French author haunted by memories of her mother being taken away by Nazis, written specially for her by its director Ismail Merchant (see Merchant-Ivory); Lisa (2001), in which she played an elderly woman prompted by a film-maker to recount the story of her relationship with a Jewish actor who disappeared during World War II; and as an ageing Marguerite Duras in Cet Amour-là (2001; This Love).

A renowned singer, Moreau was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque in 1964. She has been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, and in 1996 was given the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ Lifetime Achievement Award. She was presented with the honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival.