RIP Micheline Presle

 

Micheline Presle, the last legend of cinema has passed away

Le’Figaro

By Bertrand Guyard

February 21, 2024

 

The great actress passed away on Wednesday at the age of 101. From “The Devil in the Body” to the Saintes Chéries and Vénus Beauté Institut, in tribute to her talent, Le Figaro presents an anthology of her most beautiful roles.

Jean Gabin told her as the best compliment to her charm: "Just look at you and we forgive you everything..." Micheline Presle, the heroine of The Devil in the Body, the Saint Darling of our youth, passed away on Wednesday. "Micheline passed away peacefully, at the Maison Nationale des Artistes in Nogent-sur-Marne" in the Val-de-Marne, said her son-in-law Olivier Bomsel, adding that the funeral would take place in privacy.

The actress, who was 101 years old, is a movie legend. On screen she played with Gérard Philipe, Errol Flynn, Louis Jourdan, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman and of course Jean Gabin, the greatest sacred monsters of the seventh art of the twentieth century.

This actress with emerald eyes, with a bright and sweet smile at the same time, whom François Truffaut, then still a film critic, considered "the greatest actress in the world", Jacques Becker's divine Falbalas possessed an "instinctive" acting that adapted to the darkest scenarios and the lightest stories. And as a miracle of longevity, more than half a century after her debut, her daughter, director Tonie Marshall, never failed to entrust him with roles commensurate with her talent in her comedies of manners.

The Devil in the Body...

Micheline Chassagne, as she was known in the city, was born on August 22, 1922, on rue des Bernardins, at the end of the Latin Quarter and a stone's throw from the Jardin du Luxembourg, which she cherished like a Proust's Madeleine all her life. The passion for cinema of this child with a character as mischievous as it was strong was awakened in 1932. Her father, an investment banker, takes her to see a movie for the first time. The little girl was only ten years old at the time and she marvelled at the seductresses of the time, Henri Garat and Jean Murat.

Fascinated by what was still the beginnings of talking cinema, in the years that followed, she patiently waited for the bell to ring at the end of the school, the Collège de Notre-Dame-de-Sion, to immediately run to the dark rooms of the cinemas in her neighborhood. There, she escapes and perhaps imagines that one day, she will also make the spectators dream. The dream came true and the first miracle occurred in 1938. Micheline, who was only fifteen years old, landed a small role in "Je chante", a film starring Charles Trenet.

She enrolled in Raymond Rouleau's course. Chance, as always, does things well. On the day of the first audition, Rudolph Josef, the assistant of the German director Georg Pabst, was present. He is looking for young heroines for the film Young Girls in Distress. He finds Micheline astonishing in her natural nature. Rouleau's student prodigy thus landed her first major role and her pseudonym. She plays Jacqueline Presle... like a pearl, a jewel.

In Pabst's film, in which she plays a leader and a rebel, Micheline Presle steals the screen. Abel Gance, who was privileged, saw the rushes and decided to hire her to play two characters, a mother and a daughter, in Paradise Lost. The year is 1940. The new little wonder of French cinema achieves this feat when she is not yet 18 years old. The film was released after France’s defeat by Germany. After the Armistice, she decided to leave the capital for Cannes, where the beginnings of the Festival had been born a year earlier.

In this frivolous world, however, you have to keep yourself busy. Rumor and newspapers, which were not yet called celebrities, betrothed her to the very attractive Louis Jourdan, whose father owned the Hôtel du Carlton. The idyll will be short-lived. In the evening, we go out to the theatre. Micheline Presle discovers a gifted young premier. His name is Gérard Philip, without the final e. She won’t forget it. The actress had to wait until the end of 1944, after the Liberation, to find a role that suited her. Jacques Becker, who met her after Goupi Mains Rouges, offered her the role of the heroine of Falbalas, a love story in the fashion world. Like Félicie Nanteuil, Micheline Presle would later confess to having a rare fondness for “this luminous film”.

The actress then rubbed shoulders with Maupassant. Under the direction of Christian-Jaque and with dialogues by Henri Jeanson, she became “Boule de Suif”, a “patriotic whore”, as some critics of the time wrote, who resisted the Prussians in her own way during the war of 1870 by stabbing an officer who wanted to abuse her.

Gérard Philipe’s choice

In 1946, the actress met Jean Cocteau, who asked her to read Radiguet's The Devil in the Body. The novel and its whiff of scandal seem perfect to her. She contacted Autant Lara Aurenche and Bost, who came to see her in Brussels where she performed a play Am Stram Gram by André Roussin. They are thrilled, especially since Micheline Presle brings as a gift the ideal actor to play François Jaubert, the hero of the film, Gérard Philipe. She has known his talent since 1941 when she saw him play in the theatre in Cannes alongside Madeleine Robinson. This film, which caused a scandal at the time because it told the story of a young woman who takes a lover while her husband risks his life in trench warfare in 1914-18, will remain as the major work of his career.

After The Devil in the Body, the sirens of Hollywood pushed her to try her luck in America. On the other side of the Atlantic, she met Bill Marshall, who was married to a big star of the time, Michele Morgan. The man is attractive, is an influential agent in Los Angeles and is also an actor who starred with Errol Flynn - and Ronald Reagan - in The Santa Fe Trail. It was love at first sight and the two lovebirds married in Santa Barbara a few months later, on September 3, 1949. This union will last a long time, giving birth to some beautiful encounters with Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Fritz Lang... and films of little interest in which Micheline Presle plays, in her own words - in excellent English all the same - "the pretty French woman on duty". The only happy memory of this American period will be the birth of her daughter Tonie who was born on November 25, 1951, in France after a hasty departure from the United States.

Undisputed star before and just after the war of 40 after the disastrous interlude in America, the career of Micheline Presle struggled to resume on her return to France. The 1950s (Were Versailles Told to Me, The Bride Is Too Beautiful, Christine...) only offered her roles as pretty women whose beauty was irreversibly fading. The passion for cinema did not abandon her and as a good poker player, at the end of the years her lucky star shone again. She first filmed under the direction of a master of the seventh Joseph Losey, a thriller with a complex plot, the investigation of Inspector Morgan. Then it was Jean Delannoy's turn to offer her the character of Perle Germain Joubert in Le Baron de l'écluse, adapted from a short story by Georges Simenon. In this film dialogued by Michel Audiard, her distinguished cheekiness as a Parisian from the Latin Quarter works wonders. Jean Gabin, her on-screen partner, delighted to play her, said of the woman he called Mademoiselle Presle: "She plays to perfection a demi-mondaine, very mondaine."

The virtuous spiral of success even took an unexpected turn in 1964 with what Micheline Presle humorously called "the holy series" in her memoirs. In 1963, Jean Becker called her to entrust her with the character of Eve Lagarde, an emancipated, liberated woman in her forties, whose character foreshadows the societal upheavals of May '68. This soap opera entitled Les Saintes chéries, like the work of Nicole de Buron that inspired it, will hold millions of French people in front of the only channel of the late ORTF during the five years that it lasted.

After having worked with undisguised joy with directors she describes as "innovators" such as Jérôme Savary and Jacques Davila when she received an honorary César in 2004, the actress has the distinction of being able to perform under the direction of her own daughter Tonie Marshall. The actress, proud of the success of her only child, wrote in Di(s)gressions: "She took charge of herself in a masterful way." And always humble in the face of a life that had a huge star of her at the age of 16, she liked to repeat the last days of her life, that in the Luxembourg Gardens where she liked to walk, people who always recognized her, stopped her to say: "Ah, I saw you in Tonie Marshall's film."

PRESLE, Micheline (Micheline Nicole Julia Emilienne Chassagne)

Born: 8/22/1922, Paris, Île-de-France, France

Died: 2/21/2024, Val-de-Marne, Paris, Île-de-France, France

 

Micheline Presle’s western – actress:

The Legend of Frenchie King – 1971 (Aunt Amelie)