Lovers of the seventh art are in mourning for an actress who lit up cinemas for more than seven decades. Micheline Presle left us today, at the age of 101.
Even when she was very young, she loved to take refuge in the cozy warmth of cinemas to escape, and, for the passionate child that she was, everything was an excuse for comedy: a beach cabin became a theater, a bath towel changed into a velvet curtain under the stunned eyes of his little brother or his boarding school friends. To the exasperated superior who predicted one day, like a curse, that she was going to end up on the stage, the teenager retorted that she asked for nothing better.
His father seeing his career plans as a family dishonor, he needed a pseudonym. She swapped her name for that of the first heroine she played in 1939, Jacqueline Presle in the film Young Girls in Distress. Micheline Chassagne then became Micheline Presle, and took it upon herself to prove through her rapid successes that she was, for her part, not in the least in distress: her triumph in Paradis Perdu by Abel Gance in 1940 was the first of ‘a long series.
His limpid gaze and his ingenuous pout knew how to be colored with all the emotions, to express pride, candor, anger, to make the hearts of his spectators heavy or light, to embody a thousand faces of humanity. For Jacques Demy, she was a bourgeois mother of 7 moral tales and the extravagant red queen of Donkey Skin. For Sacha Guitry, she wore the muslins of Hortense Beauharnais and the satins of Madame de Pompadour. For Jacques Rivette, she took the veil of one of Diderot’s nuns. She particularly knew how to give substance to the heroines of literary masterpieces: the big-hearted courtesans of La Dame aux Camélias or Boule-de-Suif, the passionate lovers of Radiguet, Madame de Séryeuse in Le Bal du comte d’Orgel or Marthe in Le Diable au corps. To accompany her on screen, she cast alongside her a young, still unknown actor whom she had discovered, a certain Gérard Philippe.
Her abundant career, which led her from role to role to the rank of icon, nevertheless experienced slumps and difficulties. Having left for Hollywood in 1948 for love, while she was at the height of her fame, she concluded a contract with Fox which only provided her with disappointing roles. Her return to France three years later cruelly taught her that she was no longer the star she once was. It was not until the 1960s that her career achieved new popular success with the role of Eve, the heroine of the television series Les Saintes Chéries, where she brilliantly played the adventures of a middle-class French couple whose the setbacks and adventures offered a mirror full of self-deprecation and humor to those of his generation. On the stage, she was particularly fond of Feydeau, and portrayed an unforgettable Virginia Woolf in 1966 in a production by Franco Zeffirelli.
Through the ebbs and flows of destiny, his career was always driven by an incredible pleasure in the game, which shines through in each of his lines. To play, for her, was to make a fairy tale come true, to tour was to go on vacation, to go on stage was to ascend to paradise. She had a vital need to vibrate in unison with the spectators into whom she infused sadness, love, often laughter, with a comic talent that she never stopped asserting, until the last years of her life. .
The President of the Republic and his wife salute the talent of a star of French cinema who has shone on our screens for more than seventy years. They send their sincere condolences to his family, to his loved ones, to all the spectators who will miss his power of play and emotion.