Annie Girardot

Annie Girardot, who died on February 28 aged 79, was a hugely popular star of French cinema, especially in the 1970s. 

Relatively few of her more than 100 films were shown in Britain; one that was, however, became the picture by which she is remembered worldwide today — Luchino Visconti’s epic Rocco and His Brothers (1960), which was shot in Italian and whose co-star, Renato Salvatori, she later married.

Annie Girardot woth Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers

Born on October 25 1931, Annie Girardot graduated with honours from the Conservatoire de Paris and originally trained as a nurse, but switched careers and enrolled in 1954 with the Comédie Française. She stayed with the company for three years, during which time she also made an inauspicious screen debut in 13 at Table (1955).

Visconti was the making of her. Echoing the sweep of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers and the intensity of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Rocco and His Brothers offered her the role of a lifetime as a prostitute, Nadia, caught between the manic passion of one brother and the quasi-spiritual aspirations of another. Two sequences especially stood out: her rejection of the saintly Rocco on the spectacularly photographed roof of Milan Cathedral and her final assassination by his carnal brother (Salvatori) in a gesture inevitably recalling the Crucifixion.

Annie Girardot never found another lead role to match this and for the most part settled into comfy acceptance of roles in comedies and dramas too parochial for export and therefore unknown here.

She was much admired, however, in France and won three Césars, the local equivalent of the Oscar. She also bagged the best actress prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival for her work in Marcel Carné’s Trois Chambres à Manhattan as a woman adrift in New York.

She might have been better remembered overseas had she held out for more demanding parts. She certainly had the talent but not, perhaps, the drive. Claude Lelouch, for example (who made the crowd-pleasing drama A Man and a Woman) persuaded her to star in six of his anodyne movies, now mostly forgotten.
Comparisons must inevitably be drawn with Jeanne Moreau, a not dissimilar actress whose early career had also featured a sensation – in her case Les Amants. But Moreau went on to win acclaim playing Doll Tearsheet in Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation Chimes at Midnight and to work for such distinguished directors as Joseph Losey and even Elia Kazan in his film of The Last Tycoon.
Relatively late in life Annie Girardot must have realised that, as an actress, she had missed her moment. She began too late to court the kind of film-maker who might have done her career a power of good — such as Austria’s Michael Haneke, who sensed that there was more to this actress than anyone except Visconti had been able to tap. He gave her one chance to shine and then another. In her later career, two of the most impressive films are those she made for him in 2002 (The Piano Teacher) and 2005 (Hidden).
Isabelle Huppert was the star of The Piano Teacher, about a woman approaching middle age who gains sexual gratification through self-mutilation, but Annie Girardot registered just as strongly in a supporting role as her steely, vindictive mother, who may ultimately have been responsible for her daughter’s hang-ups. It secured her a supporting actress award in the annual Césars. She also had a cameo role in the equally powerful Hidden, though this time her thunder was stolen by the leads — Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche.
Annie Girardot married the Italian actor Renato Salvatori in 1962, by whom she had a daughter. They subsequently separated but did not divorce.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8360318/Annie-Girardot.html