Actresses: Making the Most of Love

• Share

(4 of 10)

A Small Universe. Moreau's need for such a deep understanding with her directors often leads to her falling in love with them—and they with her—at least for the run of the show. "Making movies is very directly related to love," she believes. "That's the secret of it. It's like life aboard ship, but each day is a new emergency. It's like living with the air-raid sirens on for months at a time. Each person is undergoing an intense private experience without the consolation of privacy—he is part of a very excited crowd, yet he is alone.

"I create a small universe to live within," she says. "It's absolutely necessary. I go toward someone and build a relationship that helps explain my role. The urgency of the atmosphere makes everyone very familiar with each other, and familiarity of course leads to what might be called promiscuity. So much the better. I've made friends in films in a matter of days whom I would gladly devote a lifetime to knowing. It's a gift to lead this life at times."

Between films, Moreau lives very quietly within her circle of friends—Novelist Marguerite Duras, Director François Truffaut, Actor Jean-Claude Brialy, Florence Malraux, daughter of the French Cultural Minister, a few others. She is almost never seen in a nightclub, only rarely at Paris parties. Instead she retreats to the country house she bought last March in the wooded hills above the Riviera, a secluded, rustic mansion which she has artfully converted into a kind of sanitarium for all that ails her and her friends. She cooks with imagination and flourish, inspects the yield of her chestnut trees, walks in her woods with her German shepherd dog. "I have begun to find serenity in the last few years," she says. "My life used to be in very poor balance."

Soldiers on the Stairs. Recalling her life often brings Moreau to the point of tears, and sometimes she cries. "All the bad ideas I have about marriage, I got from my family," she says. Her father, Anatole, was the rakish owner of a Montmartre restaurant called La Cloche d'Or, popular in the '20s with the show-business crowd. Her mother, an English dancer named Kathleen Buckley, had come to Paris at the age of 17 to dance with the Tiller Girls at the Folies-Bergére. She met Anatole at the restaurant, and they were married when she was 20. The Moreau family, descended from a long line of farmers, never quite welcomed her into the fold. Jeanne was born in Paris in 1928, and a few years later the family moved south to Vichy, spending vacations at the ancestral village of Mazirat, a town of 30 houses in a valley in the Allier. "It was wonderful there," Jeanne says. "Every tombstone in the cemetery was for a Moreau."