French actress and director who has appeared in over 49 films. Moreau is the winner of the Lion d’Or Award, Venice, 1992, Moliere Award, 1988, Commander of French Arts and Letters, 1985, Legion d’ Honneur, 1975 and 1991, and Order of Merit, 1973 and 1988. Famous in France, she has done very few American films. She directed several films in 1975 and 1979.
She was the daughter of an English dancer and a French barman who operated a small hotel in Paris. One of its permanent residents was a fin de siecle courtesan named Amelie D’Alencon who befriended the imaginative Moreau. Growing up in Paris under Nazi rule, she developed a love of literature and theater and decided very much against her father’s wishes to become an actress. After acceptance at the Paris Conservatoire in 1946, she made her stage debut the following year at the Avignon Theater Festival in “La Terasse du Midi.”
At 19 Moreau was invited to join the Comedie Francais and became, on her 20th birthday, the youngest full-time member in the history of the company. After performing with Comedie Francais for four years, playing 22 parts and appearing in nearly all their productions, she left the company in 1951, finding it too restrictive and authoritarian, and joined the Theater Nationale Populaire, and innovative company that specialized in experimental productions.
Moreau’s film career began in 1949 while still playing with Comedie Francais and over the next ten years she made over 20 films, mostly low-budget B movies in which she played the romantic female role. Her breakthrough came in 1958 when Louis Malle, a trailblazer of progressive French cinema, cast her in a major role in his first feature film, “Asenseur pour l’echafaud.” As a result of the relationship established between the two during the course of the shooting, Malle wrote his second film, Les Amants, 1959, especially for her. Despite its controversial content, the film received critical and popular success and launched Moreau in her international career. Other directors wanted to work with one of the most challenging of modern screen actresses as she seems dumpy and plain one minute, but the next moment fills her face with a life that is riveting and bares a vivid, vulnerable soul. An especially vivid trait is her ability to convey an excessive depth of thought and feeling beneath the surface of her characters. One French writer observed, “Where Brigitte Bardot was sex and Catherine Deneuve elegance, Moreau incarnated intellectual French femininity.” By the end of 1959, she was already regarded as “the prime stage actress of her generation.”
In 1961, Moreau appeared in the French film “Jules et Jim,” directed by Francois Truffault. It was to become her best known work. Throughout the ’60s, Moreau worked with European film directors including Peter Brooks, Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Bunuel and made her Hollywood debut, where she appeared in several unmemorable films.
Throughout the ’70s and into the present, Moreau continued to avoid commercially successful films, preferring the flexibility of film noir. Following her appearance in the Hollywood film “The Last Tycoon” in 1976, she made her directorial debut that same year in the film “Lumiere,” where, in addition to playing the lead character, she wrote the screenplay. Other films in the ’90s include “Until the End of the World” in 1991 and “I Love You, I Love You Not” in 1997. “You can’t stay put,” she said, “The world is constantly changing. I’m open to anything – and that’s how I’ve met so many beautiful people and had so many incredible experiences.”
Moreau had a son, Jerome, in 1949 with her first husband, Jean Louis Richard and made a second marriage to director William Friedkin. She makes her home in Paris.
Moreau died on 31 July 2017, at the age of 89 in Paris.
Link to Wikipedia biography