Marie-France Pisier in Charles Jarrott’s The Other Side of Midnight (top); Pisier with Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut’s Love at Twenty segment “Antoine and Colette” (bottom)
Marie-France Pisier, best-known internationally as one of François Truffaut’s New Wave muses and as the star of the trashy Hollywood melodrama The Other Side of Midnight, was found dead early morning on Easter Sunday, April 24, in the swimming pool of her home in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer in the South of France. Her death apparently occurred late Saturday night or very early Sunday. Pisier was 66.
Her body was discovered by her husband, businessman Thierry Funck-Brentano. The cause of death is unknown, but foul play isn’t suspected.
Pisier was expected to take part at an homage to Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom she had co-starred in Gérard Oury’s L’as des as / The Ace of Aces (1982), at the Cannes Film Festival next month.
Pisier (born on May 10, 1944, in Dalat, French Indochina [in today’s Vietnam]) had an extensive film career in France. At 17, she was discovered by Truffaut, who cast her as Colette Tazzi in the L’amour à vingt ans / Love at 20 segment "Antoine and Colette." Antoine, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, was Truffaut’s regular on-screen alter ego.
Co-directed by Truffaut, Shintaro Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini, and Andrzej Wajda, Love at 20 wasn’t exactly a highlight of any of the directors’ careers. Truffaut, however, perhaps identifying with Antoine a little too much, became so enamored of his Colette that he temporarily left his wife and children for Pisier.
Pisier’s Colette would be seen twice again: briefly in Stolen Kisses (1968), in which Léaud/Antoine’s romantic interests are Delphine Seyrig and Claude Jade, and in the last installment in the series, Love on the Run (1979), an unhappy experience for Truffaut ("François hated this project very early on," Pisier would say), and one that she also co-wrote.
Pisier never became a New Wave star. Despite her early association with Truffaut, her career as a serious film actress was to take off only in the ’70s, after working with the likes of Jacques Rivette in Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), to whose dialogue and situations she and fellow players Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, and Bulle Ogier officially contributed, and Luis Buñuel in the mordant The Phantom of Liberty (1974), in which Pisier is one of several people sitting (pants down; dresses up) on toilet bowls around a table and who must excuse themselves and go behind closed doors whenever they need to munch on something.
There were also André Téchiné’s Souvenirs d’en France / French Provincial (1975), in which Pisier played opposite Jeanne Moreau and Michel Auclair (and mocked Greta Garbo’s Camille); and Jean-Charles Tacchella’s romantic comedy Cousin, Cousine, starring Victor Lanoux and Academy Award nominee Marie Christine Barrault. In the international hit, Pisier plays Lanoux’s jealous wife, who believes he’s having an affair with cousine Barrault.
Pisier won her first César, as Best Supporting Actress, for both Cousin, Cousine and French Provincial. She would win again the following year, also in the supporting category, for her performance as a prostitute-mother in Téchiné’s Barocco (1976), co-starring Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu.
Directed by Charles Jarrott (who died last March), the film version of Sidney Sheldon‘ novel The Other Side of Midnight was a consequence of the success of Cousin, Cousine. But despite the input of adapters Herman Raucher (Summer of ’42) and Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity, Picnic), the period melodrama was massacred by critics. Pisier herself reportedly had trouble keeping a straight face when she had to deliver her last line in the film, something or other about loving the sun.
Yet, none of that prevented the good-looking but overlong (2h45m) and overripe melodrama about love, lust, greed, jealousy, and revenge from becoming one of the year’s biggest hits, earning 20th Century Fox $18.4m (approx. $88.54m today) in rentals (* see next page) in North America.
John Beck played Pisier’s romantic interest; Raf Vallone a conniving Aristotle Onassis-like Greek tycoon; and Susan Sarandon, who quietly steals the show, Beck’s wife.
These were all great movies, they have an absolutely amazing photography and, of course, magical views of Paris accompanied with wonderful music.
Just wanting to see if Ms. Pisier was apprearing in anything currently, I was terribly saddened to learn she had recently died….apparently while swimming in her pool at home. I first saw her in the terribly maligned “Other Side of Midnight” and was struck by her unique beauty and acting ability. One might say I had a teenage crush on the lady, not unlike that which “young” men are wont to acquire while watching movies in their teen years. She will be missed by movie buffs everywhere. Sincere condolences to her husband, other family members, and her true friends.