Films starring Jeanne Moreau

Ultimately as enigmatic and unknowable as the character with which she will be for ever associated, the capricious Catherine in François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961), Jeanne Moreau is simply one of the finest actors in screen history.

Although nicknamed 'La Sexe Bombe' by the French press, her appeal has always defied such crude pige... show more >

Ultimately as enigmatic and unknowable as the character with which she will be for ever associated, the capricious Catherine in François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961), Jeanne Moreau is simply one of the finest actors in screen history.

Although nicknamed 'La Sexe Bombe' by the French press, her appeal has always defied such crude pigeonholing, turning from repressed hauteur to wholesome erotic allure in a moment. Maybe part of the reason she has never quite fitted into anyone else's plans, and has always done things on her own terms, comes from her French/English background. Her mother was a dancer from Oldham, her father a Parisian café owner.

Although an established stage actress who trained for the stage at the Paris Conservatoire, Moreau took 19 films to establish herself and, even at the height of her powers, marriages to directors Jean-Louis Richard and William Friedkin and romances with Louis Malle and Pierre Cardin often made bigger headlines than her pictures.

Her sultry siren sullenness was perhaps best showcased Louis Malle's Lift to the Scaffold (1957) and Les Amants (1958) - although Joseph Losey also caught the illicit appeal that led some to dub her 'the French Bette Davis' (a tag she disliked) in Eva (1962).

It is inevitable that although she worked with a laudably diverse range of international film-makers, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles (who described her as 'the greatest actress in the world'), had a succesful singing career, and even directed a handful of films that are long overdue reappraisal, Moreau will always be known as the nouvelle vague's favourite femme fatale.

Finally, please don't call her a 'grande dame' unless you want a short response. Resolutely unsentimental and utterly dismissive of nostalgia, which she describes as a way of dying before you die, she's still looking to the future. < show less