mDuras and Orson Welles, both directors Jeanne Moreau felt saved with. Orson admired Moreau and brought her into three fantastic literary worlds, to Shakespeare, in Falstaff, to Kafka, in ‘The Process’, to Tania Blixen in ‘Une histoire immortelle’.
Then Moreau and Welles created another film, their fourth one called ‘The Deep’, which was unfortunately never completed, however the most adventurous project, what the cinema has to offer: an obsession drama on two swinging boats: pure destabilization banned on celluloid.
I am subject to very powerful lows. When you have highs, you have terrible lows. When you pinpoint that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, it is very frightening.
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Jeanne Moreau
Largely thanks to those films, Moreau went on to work with many of the best known New Wave and avant-garde directors.
François Truffaut’s New Wave film Jules et Jim (1962), her biggest success internationally, is centred on her magnetic starring role.
She has also worked with a number of other notable directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni (La notte and Beyond the Clouds), Orson Welles (The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story), Luis Buñuel (Diary of a Chambermaid), Elia Kazan (The Last Tycoon), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Querelle), Wim Wenders (Until the End of the World), Carl Foreman (Champion and The Victors), and Manoel de Oliveira (Gebo et l’Ombre). In 1983 she was head of the jury at the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival.
In 2005, she was awarded with the Stanislavsky Award at the 27th Moscow International Film Festival.
Happy Birthday, Jeanne.
