Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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The intensity of Moreau's encounters with the characters she plays is not entirely an act of will. She may begin by interpreting them, but she winds up substituting herself for them, and in the end their adventures are quite literally her own. Is it she who becomes the character, or the character who emerges from the script to become her? —she does not know. But she cannot bear to see most of the films she has made; they force upon her too dramatic a confrontation with her own past. "The love, suffering and happiness I experience in life appear in my movies," she says. "When I see a film after I've made it, I see myself, I see my own life before me."

End as a Convalescent. Moreau's friends have observed her internal changeover time and again, and they have long since grown used to thinking of her in terms of what movie she's in. But the depth of the transformation amazes them, and they are always genuinely relieved to see her come out the other side, once the movie is made. "The drama of her life is that there is no difference between her acting and her private life," says Producer Raoul Levy, uneasily recalling that during the shooting of Moderato Cantabile in 1960, she started drinking wine in the morning, duplicating the troubling habit of the suicidal character she played. Says her friend Marguerite Duras, who wrote Moderato: "She emerges from her films a convalescent, both physically and morally."

Sometimes, as with La Notte, a study of conjugal boredom, the identity of art and artist chills Moreau's soul. She disagreed with the film's black point of view, hated making it, and still refuses to sympathize with the spiritually anesthetized character she played. Yet there was something of her in every tremor of the composed, presentable grief that La Notte mercilessly dissected, and four years afterward it can still make her shudder. "There are people like that poor woman, of course," she says, "but that is not what love is like. Not for me, at least. Not for me."

Necessary Mystery. Still, Moreau makes no effort at all to find parts that express so much as her passing mood, let alone anything substantial of her own life. She far prefers that other people choose her roles for her; to make the choice herself, she thinks, would invite a fatal struggle with her vanity. "If I get concerned with what kind of part I would like to play," she says, "I would then start to wonder what roles would be good for me, good for my career, pleasing to the public. Life does not invite this choice, and neither should films."

Her only question when she is offered a new part in a film is who the director will be, and the answer has to be right. "The actor must be totally at the director's disposal—that is the art of acting," she says, "and for that, one must have a complete, unquestioning rapport. In every role there are situations and attitudes in which I can imagine myself. The rest is a mystery, and I must preserve the mystery. It is the director's mystery, for him to unravel."