Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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The passenger on the Air France flight from Paris to Mexico City whose bags were 260 Ibs. overweight was, of course, a movie star. Because of her, flowers were waiting at the airport, and so was the press. Floodlights were turned on to make a patch of noon on the dark runway, and the photographers stood poised at its fringes, squinting up into the light as the first tourists filed off the plane. Then she appeared in the welcoming glare—and nobody took her picture. An awkward moment. She smiled and started down the ramp. "There she is!" cried the producer of the film she had come to make. "That's Jeanne Moreau!"

The tired, startled eyes smiled out from all the papers the next morning, decorating stories that explained that Jeanne Moreau was the other girl in Viva Maria!, the movie that had brought Brigitte Bardot to Mexico five days earlier. Brigitte's arrival had been the real wild-eyed thing—riot police with tear-gas pistols, screams, a fight, grown men fainting. But Moreau is not the kind of actress who requires a motorcycle escort. Indeed, she hardly looks like an actress at all—too small, too thin, too true. "Beautiful?" she says. "Of course not. That's the whole point about me, isn't it?"

The Lingering Look. Perhaps it is, but Marcello Mastroianni falls into a Neapolitan reverie at the very mention of her name (". . . her childish, pouty lips, that slightly devastated look, her tiny, Japanese hands . . ."), and film directors all over the world have to struggle to praise her enough. "She can be elemental or elegant, warm or astringent—in fact, anything she chooses," says Orson Welles. England's Tony Richardson calls her "more informed, committed and passionate" than any actress he knows: "She is totally involved in the seriousness and importance of movies as distinct from the money and glamour." India's Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy) and Hollywood's Carl Foreman (The Victors) both say she is peerless in films today. And François Truffaut, whose Jules and Jim caught much of her chameleonic range, says: "She has all the qualities one expects in a woman, plus all those one expects in a man—without the inconveniences of either."

Moreau, in a word, is it. There is no actress in Hollywood or Europe who can match the depth and breadth of her art. There is no personality in films so able to withstand the long, lingering look of the modern movie camera, no one whose simple presence on the screen evokes such a variety of moods. Her love scenes are among the most intense ever filmed, her suffering agonizingly acute. She is an actress of infinite complexity and conviction, and the only thing wrong with calling her the modern Garbo is that she is so much better an actress than Garbo ever was.