Danielle Darrieux, who turned 100 on May 1 and appeared in over 110 films, perhaps most famously in three directed by Max Ophuls, has passed away, reports the AP.
“Unlike most branded stars whose appeal can be captured in one well-chosen adjective, the multifaceted Darrieux would require the whole thesaurus,” wrote Steven Mears for Film Comment in May. “All accounts must begin with the self-possession that’s sparked every one of her performances since her debut at age 14 in 1931’s Le Bal. Not for nothing is the actress’s full name Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux: she commands the screen as if born to rule, though her subjects would never think of revolting. Her stardom was solidified while still in her teens by the romantic tearjerker Mayerling (1936, her first pairing with Charles Boyer). And so she was persuaded to try her luck in Hollywood, signing a contract with Universal that yielded just one film: a made-to-order soufflé called The Rage of Paris (1938).”
“By all rights that should have started a career for her in America, but she went back to France,” wrote Dan Callahan for RogerEbert.com, also in May. Callahan’s appreciation naturally focuses on the films by Ophuls. Writing about La ronde (1950), he suggests that the “closest American equivalents to Darrieux would be Myrna Loy or Claudette Colbert, sophisticated women who knew how to hold back and survey men with tenderness and amusement. . . . In Ophuls’s Le plaisir (1952), Darrieux is a tart on a holiday in the country, a dreamer and a pouter with a beauty mark on her chin who finds herself weeping for her lost innocence when she and her fellow harlots visit a church. . . . And then Darrieux was the centerpiece in one of the greatest films ever made, Ophuls’s tragic romance The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953).” This would be “the height of Darrieux’s career, and the various literary adaptations she made after that, like a tame and unsexy movie of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1955), did not do justice to her looks, spirit, or talent. But Jacques Demy rescued her for two films in which she sang: The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), where she wistfully but pragmatically ran a French fry stand, and Une chambre en ville (1982), where she played a haughty, tippling widow in a mature, unsparing style that suggested Darrieux no longer cared just about being liked by her audience.”
Writing about Le ronde for Criterion, Terrence Rafferty zeroes in on “Darrieux’s two wonderful scenes, the first with an ardent young paramour she’s trying—and failing—to dump [Daniel Gélin], and the second with her stuffy husband [Fernand Gravey], who, while steadfastly refusing to admit to himself that he has suspicions about her fidelity, is nonetheless a tad defensive about the on-and-off nature of their connubial relationship. In both cases, the woman winds up yielding to the man she’s with, each of them a man who falls far short of satisfying her deepest desires, and Darrieux lets you see every tiny variation in the strength of her resolve, from firm determination to what-the-hell surrender and everything in between.”
Molly Haskell on The Earrings of Madame de . . .: “The ripe little beauty from the early part of the film becomes physically wasted. In her agonizing and comical last encounter with [Vittorio] De Sica, she has rushed to warn him about the duel, knowing he no longer loves her but still daring to hope. ‘I’m not even pretty anymore,’ she says sadly. ‘You’re prettier than ever,’ he replies. ‘Really?’ Her eyes light up, with a coquetry that shows how much she is still herself. Then as quickly, ‘I’m incorrigible,’ she confesses, with an awareness that shows just how far she has come. And it also measures just how far Darrieux has come, from a doll-like ingenue in her early films to an actor capable of giving this complex performance; she’s searing, ruthless, and, yes, more beautiful than ever.”
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