The French writer and actress Anne Wiazemsky, who famously wrote a best-selling account of her short marriage to New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, died of cancer in Paris on Thursday, her family said.
"Anne died this morning. She had been very sick," her brother Pierre Wiazemsky, an actor, told AFP.
Wiazemsky,
70, made her screen debut as an elfin 19-year-old in "Au Hasard
Balthazar", Robert Bresson's classic 1966 film about a mistreated
Christ-like donkey, before meeting Godard -- then at the height of his
fame -- a year later.
They married during
the shooting of his 1967 film "La Chinoise", in which Wiazemsky plays a
member of a Maoist revolutionary cell.
Her
grandfather, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Francois Mauriac, opposed
the marriage to the radical maker of "Breathless" and "Contempt", who
was 17 years her senior.
But the French student uprising and strikes of May 1968, in which Godard became a major player, overwhelmed them.
"The further it went on, the more our paths diverged," Wiazemsky told AFP in an interview this year.
She
later wrote a book about their short-lived relationship, "Un An Apres"
(One Year Later). It was the basis of a recent comedy about Godard, "Le
Redoutable" (Redoubtable), by the Oscar-winning director of "The
Artist", Michel Hazanavicius.
One of Wiazemsky's last public appearances was at the movie's premiere at the Cannes film festival in May.
She
appeared in more than 35 films, most memorably alongside Terence Stamp
in Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Theorem", which was initially banned for
obscenity in Italy in 1968 for its story of a lost disciple of Christ
who seduces a whole family.
But she
gradually set aside acting for writing, publishing more than a dozen
novels. Her final book, "Un Saint Homme" (A Holy Man) came out last
year.
No comments:
Post a Comment