Orson Welles called Jeanne Moreau the world's greatest actress
French star Jeanne Moreau moved from Comédie-Française stages to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows and Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Orson Welles, who directed her more than once, flatly named her the greatest actress alive—praise her New Wave peers rarely contradicted.
Born in Paris on January 23, 1928 to English dancer Katherine Buckley of the Folies Bergère and French restaurateur Anatole-Désiré Moreau, she spent childhood stretches in Vichy and the ancestral village of Mazirat, where she joked every cemetery stone bore the family name. World War II split the household; living with her mother in Paris, she lost interest in school until, at sixteen, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone decided her vocation. Conservatoire training led to a 1947 Avignon Festival debut and early Comédie-Française leads, including Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, making her a company star still in her twenties.
Film prominence arrived with Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and The Lovers (1959), after years of small screen parts beside major stage runs in Pygmalion and Cocteau. The 1960s brought a Cannes Best Actress prize for Seven Days… Seven Nights (1960), BAFTA glory for Viva Maria! (1965), and landmark roles in Antonioni’s La Notte, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962)—her biggest international success—Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, and Welles titles including The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, and The Immortal Story. She later directed Lumière (1976) and kept acting into the 2010s.
Awards stacked late as well as early: a César for Best Actress for her 1992 turn in The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea, a BAFTA Fellowship in 1996, Cannes Golden Palm for lifetime achievement in 2003, another César in 2008, plus Berlin jury duty and a Moscow Stanislavsky Award. She recorded albums, shared a Carnegie Hall bill with Frank Sinatra in 1984, and counted Cocteau, Genet, Henry Miller, and Marguerite Duras among friends. Welles’s praise that she was the greatest actress in the world followed her to the end. She died at home in Paris on July 31, 2017, aged eighty-nine.
Source: Jeanne Moreau
