By
Christine
She
once told me she never wanted to be a star, that the pleasure of
acting itself was enough for her. Perhaps that is why she always
returned to the stage, although she could have made much more money
just doing films.
Yet
Emmanuelle Riva learned she could not have her privacy and enjoy it,
too. “If I took a break from movies, they soon forgot about me.
They stopped calling. Looking back, I suppose I was too selective.
It’s what I call ‘the savage’ in me, the urge to just go off by
myself and do what I want.”
If
there was one word to describe Riva, it was “independent.” She
never married, had no children, and lived in the same Latin Quarter
Paris apartment for over 50 years. She also chose not to have a
television or a cellphone. Her apartment had a radio, a place for
art, and shelves of books. Above the fireplace was a chalkboard on
which she wrote quotes she heard on the radio, quotes about her
favorite subjects – freedom, love, and time.
Her
passion for privacy made the announcement of her death on January 27,
2017, a surprise to even some of those who knew her. According to her
agent, Anne Alvares Correa, the cause was cancer. After a memorial
service on February 4, 2017 at Saint-Germain de Charonne church
(located on the Right Bank), she was buried in Charonne cemetery.
Riva
never took the road frequently traveled. Born Paulette Germaine Riva
on February 24, 1927, in Chenimenil, a village in the mountains of
northeastern France, she grew up in nearby Remiremont. Her father,
René Alfred Riva, was a sign painter; her mother Jeanne (Fernande
Nourdin), was a seamstress. An only child, she had always wanted to
act, performing in school plays and later in a local theater troupe.
Because of the objection of her parents (Riva said her father was a
strict disciplinarian to whom the word “actress” was merely a
synonym for “prostitute”), she trained as a seamstress and worked
at that craft after graduation from high school. One day, however,
she spotted an advertisement for auditions at the Dramatic Arts
Centre of Rue Blanche in Paris. She knew she had to go – if she
remained a seamstress where she was she would have gone mad, she
said. After long discussions her parents gave in and agreed to let
her go. Her audition was conducted before none other than one of the
leading actors and directors of the Comédie-Française, the great
Jean Meyer. “All I remember was standing there, a nice little
country girl in a little skirt.” She acted a scene from Alfred
Musset’s play, There’s No Trifling With Love. Meyer
and the other teachers on the jury were impressed and awarded her a
scholarship, with Meyer himself acting as her mentor.
After
completing her studies in 1954, she landed her first role on the
Paris stage in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.
She followed that with roles in several stage productions, including
Shaw’s Mrs. Warren's Profession, Bernanos’ Le
dialogue des Carmélites, and Racine’s Britannicus.
In
1957, she made her television debut in an episode of the history
program Enigmes de l’histoire entitled "Le
Chevalier d'Éon." She played the Queen of England opposite
Marcelle Ranson-Herve as the cross-dressing knight in the service of
the French crown. In 1958 came her first film appearance, an
uncredited role in The Possessors, starring Jean Gabin.
The
following year marked her breakthrough in film. While appearing on
the Paris stage in L’Epouvantail (“The Scarecrow”),
she was visited in her dressing room by Alain Resnais, a young
documentary director looking for a leading lady for his first feature
film, Hiroshima mon amour. He told Emmanuelle he was very
impressed with her performance, especially her voice, which he felt
had the right quality for the lengthy dialogue scenes in the film. He
sent photos of her, along with a report, to the film’s
screenwriter, Marguerite Duras, who agreed with his assessment.
Hiroshima
mon amour is a beautifully constructed film about memory and
forgetfulness, recounting a series of conversations that take place
over a 36-hour long period. In the movie, Emmanuelle plays a unnamed
woman, known only in the credits as “Her.” She is an actress who
comes to Hiroshima to make an anti-war film. There she meets and
falls into an affair with a Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada
and listed in the credits as “Him.” The affair has ended and she
is preparing to leave.
Their
dialogue is conducted in voice-overs and discusses both the bombing
of Hiroshima and her early life during the war in Nevers, a town in
Occupied France, were she had an affair with a German soldier. Her
living and dead lovers – as well as the horrors of Nevers and
Hiroshima – become linked.
Riva’s
performance is the linchpin around which the film revolves. Speaking
her character’s thoughts through a voice-over, she translates each
of her feelings to delicate expressions with such eloquence that her
face became the mirror of her soul, enabling the audience to
understand what was going on inside her mind. The intelligence and
intensity of her performance made "Elle" one of the most
indelible characters in film history.
Critic Jean Domarchi noted that
"In a sense, Hiroshima is a documentary on
Emmanuelle Riva.” It is a portrayal unlike anything ever seen
before on the screen and one that was noticed by commentators from
Jean-Luc Godard to Eric Rohmer, who hailed her performance as that of
a new type of heroine, “at least not one that a certain classical
cinema has habituated us to see from David Griffith to Nicholas
Ray.”
Though
the Academy ignored her performance, she won the “Étoile de
Cristal” (France’s top film award between 1955 and 1975, given by
the “Académie française” and later replaced by the César) for
Best Actress.
She
followed up this groundbreaking performance with an excellent turn in
Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960) as a Jewish
prisoner in a concentration camp. In 1961, she starred opposite
Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Pierre Melville’s shocking for its
time Leon Morin, Priest as an atheist widow who
develops an all-too-intimate relationship with Belmondo’s young and
seductive priest. In 1962, her performance in Georges
Franju’s Therese Desqueyroux (1962), based on
Francois Mauriac’s novel about a miserable wife who tries to poison
her husband, won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 23rd
Venice Film Festival.
Other
notable films include The Hours of Love (1963), Thomas
the Impostor (1965), Liberte, le nuit (1984),
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue (1993), Venus
Beauty Institute (1999), and Julie Delpy’s Skylab (2011).
In 2011, Austrian
director Michael Haneke asked Emmanuelle if she would like to star in
his new film Amour, about a retired music teacher named
Anne who is failing mentally and physically as a result of a series
of strokes. Her husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), devotedly
cares for her as the proud woman battles the ravages brought on in
the twilight of her life. The film is a moving and stark portrait of
a couple and their love in the last days of life.
Amour was
nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and
Emmanuelle was nominated for Best Actress (the oldest person ever
nominated). The film won while she lost out to Jennifer Lawrence
for Silver Linings Playbook. However, she won the César,
the French version of the Oscar, and a BAFTA film award for the role.
Emmanuelle
also devoted much time to television, appearing in both series and
made-for-television movies including La fin de la
nuit (1966), a sequel to Therese. She also
returned frequently to the stage. In 1966, she won the “Prix du
syndicat de la critique” for Best Actress for her performance
in L'Opéra du monde. In 2001, she made her last theatre
appearance (at the time) performing in Medea at the
Festival d’Avignon. But with her success in the 2012 film Amour,
she returned to the Paris stage in 2014, co-starring with Anne
Consigny in the Marguerite Duras play Savannah Bay, for
which she won the 2014 Prix Beaumarchais.
Away
from the stage she loved to write poetry and had three books of poems
published: Juste derrière le sifflet des trains (Just
Behind the Train Whistle, 1969), Le Feu des miroirs (The
Fire of Mirrors,1975) and L'Otage du désir (The
Hostage of Desire, 1982). She also authored a book of
photographs, Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima (You
Did Not See Anything In Hiroshima), she took during the filming
of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. And in 2014 she published her
autobiography, C'est délit-cieux!: Entrer dans la
confidence (It’s a Heinous Crime: Enter in Confidence).
In February 2013,
she gave an interview to London’s Guardian newspaper
in which she summed up her career: “If I don’t act in another
film, who cares? I’m 85, it doesn’t matter. I’m still alive and
that feels great. I think that being an actor is like being a cat.
You have the opportunity to go out and live nine lives. And then you
can come home and sleep by the fire.”
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