A still from ‘The unfaithful woman’.
Feminine icons
She played countless variations of that type of character that she always nailed, surpassing the genres, and being permanently acclaimed by them
He worked with the best, Luis Buñuel, Éric Rohmer, Bertrand Tavernier, Samuel Fuller, Claude Sautet and Claude Chabrol, who in addition to being his muse, married him. Stephane Audran was on the screen the archetype of the elegant bourgeois woman with a backroom, with an indisputable erotic charge. Audran played countless variations of those types of characters that she always nailed, surpassing the genres, and being permanently acclaimed by them.
Stephane Audran (real name Colette Suzanne Dacheville) was born in Versailles, November 8, 1932, passing away in Paris on March 27, 2018. Audran began her career in the theater in the 1950s and from there she went on to the big screen of the hand of directors of the nouvelle vague, with secondary roles. His career gained momentum thanks to his meeting with Chabrol, who made her his muse and whom he married in 1964, after a brief marriage with the French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, which lasted two years (1954-1956), whose breakup It was because the actor fell in love with Brigitte Bardot. The result of his marriage to Claude Chabrol -which ended in 1980- was the actor Thomas Chabrol (1963).
Audran landed her lead role in 1959, in Chabrol’s acclaimed film ‘Los primos’. Since then he has acted in most of the director’s films. Among Chabrol’s notable films, starring her, in which she portrayed the main female character are ‘The Infidel Woman’ (1968), ‘The Hinds’ (1968) as a rich lesbian who engages in a sexual relationship between three people, a character with whom she won the Berlin Silver Bear in 1968 for the best female performance, ‘The Butcher’ (1970) as a school teacher who falls in love with a murderous butcher, ‘At night’ (1971) and ‘Prostitute by day, miss by night ‘(1978), which allowed her to win the César for best actress in a supporting role. There she played the mother of a teenager (played by Isabelle Huppert) who prostitutes herself.
After their divorce in 1980, Audran and Chabrol continued to collaborate, albeit more slowly, on titles such as ‘Pollo al vinagre’ (1984), ‘Quiet days in Clichy’ (1990) and ‘Betty’ (1992). She also acted in films by Éric Rohmer (‘The Sign of the Lion’), Jean Delannoy (‘La Peau de Torpedo’), Bertrand Tavernier (‘Coup de Touchon’), as the wife of the policeman turned serial killer, Lucien. Cordier, Claude Sautet (‘Three friends, their wives… and the others’) and Samuel Fuller (‘One red, shock division’). Audran also worked with the best actors and actresses in French cinema such as Michael Lonsdale, Laurent Terzieff, Delphine Seyrig and Bernadette Lafont. But Among the most celebrated of his films apart from those mentioned, are ‘The discrete charm of the bourgeoisie’ (1972), winner of the Oscar and directed by Luis Buñuel, in which Stéphane played the role of the bourgeois Alice Senechal, and ‘El feast de Babette’, by Gabriel Axel, which also won the Oscar. In Anglo-Saxon cinema he worked with Anatole Litvak (‘The lady in the car with glasses and a rifle’), Peter Collinson (‘Ten little black boys’) or Orson Welles, who gave him a role in his unfinished film’ The other side of the wind ‘.
Audran won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in France for her performance in ‘Prostitute by Day, Miss by Night’ (‘Violette Nozière’) and an award from the British Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Television for ‘Just Before Nightfall ‘(1975). His last film was ‘La fille de Monaco’ (2008), by Anne Fontaine, a story of sexual customs and criminal intrigues on the Côte d’Azur where he once again nailed the archetype of bourgeoisie with a backroom.
Stephane Audran passed away in Paris on March 27, 2018 at the age of 85 after a long-standing illness.
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