Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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Jeanne's parents became a divided family. First the war separated them. Her father was in the south of France; her mother, as an enemy alien, was obliged to stay in Paris to register daily with the police. During the occupation, the family moved into a Paris apartment above a brothel; when Jeanne ran down to the street, she would hurry past a long queue of waiting German soldiers. "I was happy enough," Jeanne says, "but I was a miserable brat. I wouldn't eat unless my mother danced for me and the poor woman had to dance and dance. The Moreaus were all ashamed that Anatole had married a dancer. Perhaps that's why I insisted upon it." Her best friend had died when she was twelve, and she retreated into a world of books. "I read many books far too soon," she says. "They made me sick with terror and fascination. I read Zola when I was 13."

Debut at 20. Jeanne was a good student until she was 16, but then she lost interest in school. Her father had forbidden her to go to the theater, but the theater was all that her friends talked about. One day she lied her way out of the house, went off to see Jean Anouilh's Antigone. "It had a tremendous effect on me," she recalls. "It was the first time I had ever seen actors, ever seen a real play, and I was overwhelmed." Jeanne eventually confided her fascination to her mother, who complained to a neighbor: "I have a problem with my daughter. She wants to become an actress." The neighbor, an actor himself, prescribed a drama teacher, who carefully prepared her for an audition at the Conservatoire National d'Art Dramatique. She was accepted without hesitation. A year later she made her debut at the Comédie Française in Turgenev's A Month in the Country.

Moreau looks back on her first desire to act as a child's wish to escape her own identity—"I was tired of being myself. I wanted to be someone else." Her parents had separated while she was at the Conservatoire, and her mother, after 24 difficult years in France, had returned to England with Jeanne's sister, Michelle. The separation tugged Jeanne in opposite directions, as indeed it still does: though she sympathizes with her mother, she is her father's child. The only English trait Moreau admits to is a thirst for tea with milk and sugar —as many as a dozen cups a day. "If I am ever killed," she says, "the police will find nothing but my identity papers and a small pool of tea."

One for Two Roles. In 1949, Jeanne married her lover, a young actor from the Théâtre National Populaire named Jean-Louis Richard, and the day after their wedding, their son, Jérôme, was born. "I didn't want to marry," she says, "but everyone told me it wasn't fair not to give my child a name. I was concerned only that he should look like his father, and when he was born, at 6 in the morning, he did. But then he changed and looked like all other babies." Before Jérôme was a year old, the marriage began to dissolve. "I was lost," Jeanne says, "alone with a husband and son, neither of whom needed me." Richard left after two years, but they were divorced only a year ago, discreetly and "without any bitterness," and they have remained close friends.