One of France’s greatest and most versatile
performers, Danielle Darrieux was born in Bordeaux, France, on 1st May 1917. Her
father was an army doctor who died when she was 7. Her family were keen music enthusiasts
and she studied the cello and piano at the Paris Conservatory.
Darrieux made her film debut at the age of
14 after her mother encouraged her to audition for the part of a headstrong teenager in
Wilhelm Thiele’s Le Bal (1931). Her charming feminine allure and beauty,
coupled with an instinctive and capable acting ability, drew the attention of public and
film directors. She was quickly signed up for roles in a string of films in the
1930s, many of which were musical comedies which allowed the actress to demonstrate her
impressive talent as a singer. The two films which established her as an actress
of repute were Litvak’s Mayerling
(1936) and Farkas’ Port-Arthur (1936). Darrieux scored another success
in Abus de confiance (1937), directed by her husband Henri Decoin.
Bouyed up by the international success of
Mayerling, Darrieux moved to Hollywood with Decoin where, under contract with Universal
pictures, she appeared in her first American film, Henry Koster’s The Rage of
Paris (1938). Soon after, the actress returned to France where she starred in Retour
à l’aube (1938) and Battement de coeur (1938), two of Decoin’s
better films.
Under the Nazi occupation, Darrieux became
the leading light of the Continental, a Franco-German film company which was closely scrutinised
by the Nazis. She distinguished herself in films such as Premier rendez-vous
(1941), again directed by Decoin (although the couple had recently split up).
After a visit to Germany, where she entertained the German troops, Darrieux’s popularity
in France immediately plummeted and her name was placed on a death-list of the French
Resistance. Even when her death sentence was lifted after the war, it was
several years before she had regained her former popularity. Her grand return came
in 1949 with Claude Autant-Lara’s period farce Occupe-toi d’Amélie
.
The 1950s saw a marked change in Darrieux
on-screen persona. She was no longer the care-free ingenue of her pre-war years.
She had become a sophisticated and passionate society woman, often appearing cold and
calculating, but sometimes showing a tender tragic vulnerability. The film which
defined Danielle Darrieux in this period was Madame
de… (1953), in which she gave probably her best screen performance.
This was the third of three films she appeared in which were directed by her fond admirer
Max Ophüls – the other two being La
Ronde (1950) and Le Plaisir
(1952). Darrieux gave a comparable performance in Decoin’s most austere
film, La Verité
sur Bébé Donge (1952) and made an impressive co-star to Gérard
Philipe in Autant-Lara's romantic epic Le
Rouge et le noir (1954).
In the early 1950s, Darrieux made a brief
return to the United States, where she appeared in Rich, Young and Pretty (1950) and Five
Fingers (1952). In the late 1950s, her film career was beginning to wane,
but she made a surprising comeback in Jacques Demy’s popular musical hit Les
Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966) and then in Paul Vecchiali’s En haut
des marches (1983).
In addition to her long and illustrious film
career (which spans a remarkable seventy years), Darrieux also had a number of stage successes,
most notably La Robe mauve de Valentine. She simultaneously pursued a singing
career, appearing in concert in the 1960s, and then taking the lead role in the Broadway
musical Coco in the 1970s. In the 1980s, she won further plaudits for her
role in the Paris stage musical Gigi.
© James Travers 2001
|
