Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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Imperfections & Cares. With 40 films and a brilliant career on the Paris stage already behind her, Moreau has been La Moreau to the French for years. But up until very recently, her American audience ran to cinemaphiles and espresso drinkers—the crowd that goes to Yugoslav film festivals, the people who liked 8½. Her great films—The Lovers, La Notte, Jules and Jim—played mostly in art houses, and some of her films found no U.S. distributor at all. Now, in a turn of taste that is as encouraging as it is surprising, Moreau is everywhere: opposite Burt Lancaster in The Train, Eli Wallach in The Victors, Rex Harrison in The Yellow Rolls-Royce. None of these pictures are really much good—Moreau seems to have wandered in from other, much better movies; but she is splendid in all of them, and her name is spelled out in neon on the biggest and best marquees.

Despite such success, Moreau can still go unnoticed in a crowd: her forlorn, equivocal beauty is not to be seen at a glance. At 37, she looks younger than she did at 30, but at 30 she was older than winter. Her lips point down in an inverted smile, her teeth end in saws like a child's, the color of her hair is indistinctly reddish-blondish-brown. Her eyes can be hopeful and occasionally serene, but they kindle smaller fires in the imagination than do the dark circles under them. There is desperation in her mouth, especially when she smiles, always when she laughs. Her face is an album of experience and disappointment, and its imperfections and cares are the signature of her humanity. She may look like any woman, but she is every woman.

Moreau's face proves that beauty need not be fair. In every Moreau film, the unforgettable moment is when the camera draws in close and fixes its attention squarely upon her. It is then that her beauty is evident—as in the sight of her quiet ecstasy in The Lovers, or the crucial, almost unbearable sequence in Le Dialogue des Carmélites when tears spill down from her staring eyes. Jules and Jim showed her in librarian's glasses, wearing a charcoal mustache, smoking an Italian cigar —yet it was still perfectly conceivable that the boys fell in love with her because she looked so much like a statue they saw in Greece. Moreau's beauty is full of change and is totally charismatic. It is the particular kind of beauty that Goethe described in writing of nature: "To each man she appears as befits him alone. She cloaks herself under a thousand names, and is always the same."

Wine in the Morning. In Moreau's own eyes, her life is no more real in fact than in fantasy. "How annoyed I get to hear people speak of 'the profession of acting,' " she says. "The only thing worse is when they say, 'You're a real pro.' Acting is not a profession at all; it's a way of living—one completes the other. What an actor needs is a sense of involvement, an unconscious familiarity with his role, nothing more than that. There's no point in pursuing the character's real-life experience. It's absurd to think you can truly enter it for a tame little week, anyhow. I never study my role at all before the camera starts turning and then pffft! —it begins."