Actresses: Making the Most of Love

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The Lovers' scenario might have been the banal tale of any tryst set to a Brahms sextet. A provincial housewife grows bored with her lot, takes a pointless, guarded fling at the pleasures of Paris, meets an appealing man and abandons herself to him. Malle decided to be both mystic and realistic, to try to film both the passion and the poetry of love. The resulting sequence is by now duly celebrated in the annals of film. It follows the lovers from bedroom to bath tub and back to bed again, missing very little, zeroing in on Moreau's face at her ultimate moment of rapture. Jean-Marc Bory, who played the lover, was scarcely revealed as a character, let alone a lover. But Moreau emerged as the consummate woman. When The Lovers won a prize at the Venice Festival, Moreau became celebrated as the Brave New Woman, the "Jeanne d'Arc of the boudoir." But it was the end of the affair with Malle.

New Wave, New World. As an actress, Moreau enjoyed her first moment of triumph, but she was miserable over the loss of Malle. She moved from her old apartment in the Latin Quarter to a house in Versailles, and took stock. She was 30 years old, and what did she have? Offers of films. A pen for signing autographs. An occasional friend. It was a bleak time and she considered giving up films altogether. But her life was fully committed to the rhythm and whirl of moviemaking. And if she wasn't an actress, after all, she was very little else. She brooded over her situation for ten months, and then she met François Truffaut.

At the time, Truffaut was the sternest critic on Cahíers du Cinéma, the trumpet and bible of the New Wave, and he introduced Moreau to the company of serious filmmakers and intellectuals that has been her real world ever since. "I found myself among people I understood better," she recalls, "people I wanted to know, people I admired. The cinema began to mean something to me beyond simply being an actress." Moreau went back to work with a passion, and in two years she made four films, among them three of her best: Les Liaísons Dangereuses, Le Dialogue des Carmélites, and Moderato Cantabile.

During the shooting of Moderat, her son Jérôme came to visit her on location in the Charente. He was riding in a car driven by Jean-Paul Belmondo, her costar, when the car ran off the road; Belmondo broke a wrist, but Jerome suffered a severe concussion. He was in a coma for 14 days, during which time Jeanne left his side only to console the guilt-stricken Belmondo. "I was unaware she had such strength," said a friend.

Favors for Lovers. Jérôme finally made a full recovery and is now at a boarding school near Grenoble. But his long ordeal was in some ways his mother's salvation: having witnessed life gravely threatened, she learned to value it more. Accordingly, she blossomed with new interests and enthusiasms. She has become a singer of some note in France, with two albums of songs already recorded and plans for a third. She spends her money in avalanches of generosity—presents for all her friends, a farm for her father back in Mazirat. She earnestly studies her horoscope, reads books with a passion, even mixes her own perfume.*