Danielle Darrieux: In Memoriam

The Grand Dame of French Cinema

By Gabrielle Garrieux

“Her talent, her generosity have illuminated the French cinema. Danielle Darrieux knew how to play everything with a prodigious spontaneity.” – Françoise Nyssen, Minister of Culture, via Twitter.

We have lost the grande dame of French cinema. Danielle Darrieux, known to her many fans simply as “DD,” died October 17 at her home in Bois-le-Roi in Brittany. She was 100.

Her career as an actress, singer and dancer spanned eight decades and 140 credits in film and television. Name it and she played it, whether it be an ingénue, femme fatale, flirt, or in her later years, grandmothers. 

If I were to translate her for our American readers, I would say that her closest equivalents in Hollywood would be Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, or Olivia de Havilland, sophisticated women celebrated for their cool and who regarded men with a mixture of tenderness and amusement. 

Except for one career glitch during the Occupation, when she was accused of collaboration, Darrieux has been beloved by her public, who always came out in force to see her films.     

She was born Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux in Bordeaux France on May 1, 1917, during World War I. Her father, Jean Darrieux, who died when she was seven years old, was an ophthalmologist serving in the French Army. She grew up in Paris, where her mother, Marie-Louise (nee Witkowski), gave private voice lessons in addition to her regular work as a Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire de Musique, where young Danielle studied cello, piano and voice.   

She was only 14 when she won the part of Antoinette, a Nouveaux Riche middle-class couple’s neglected daughter whose behavior is the centerpiece of the 1931 comedy/drama film Le Bal (Ballet), directed by Wilhelm Thiele.

“My mother urged me to audition for the role,” she told me in an interview. “I was, you might say, ambivalent, but my mother told me that with my looks and talent, I was made to be in the movies. I was 14, what did I know? I didn’t think I was that pretty, but I knew my mother wanted the best for me.”    

In 1934 she married the film’s writer, Henri Decoin. He became her mentor and when he turned to directing she made several films with him before their divorce in 1941.     

In 1936 her turn as the tragic adolescent Marie Vetsera opposite in Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling established her as an international star. Hollywood came calling, and in 1938 Danielle made her Hollywood debut alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Universal’s The Rage of Paris, as Nicole de Cotillion, a penniless French chorus girl in New York who decides the best career move is to snare a rich husband. Though the film was a hit at the box office, she was not interested in a career outside her native France and returned, making a few films before the Nazi occupation in June of 1940. Under contract to Universal, she repeatedly delayed any return to Hollywood with excuses of frayed nerves until her contract lapsed.     

It was in 1940 that her marriage to Decoin fell apart. The cause was Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, with whom she fell madly in love. She and Decoin had a very friendly divorce in 1941. In fact, it was so friendly that Decoin directed her in another three films more than a decade later.     

She married Rubirosa in 1942 and the couple remained in France during the Occupation. An unfortunate string of events during this time led to her being marked as a collaborator by the French Resistance.

As she was an actress of international renown, she was pursued by Continental Films, a French film company set up during the Occupation and run by Joseph Goebbels as part of the Nazi propaganda program. Her cooperation was secured when the Nazis threatened to deport her brother, Olivier, as a forced laborer. She wound up making two films for the company.

Things got even worse when Rubirosa, who was serving as the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to France, was arrested as a spy by the Gestapo after the Dominican Republic declared war on Germany in 1942. He was interned in Germany and in order to secure his release, she made a deal with Goebbels in which she agreed to take part in a propaganda tour by French actors to Berlin and stage a concert for German troops.      

When Rubirosa was finally released, the couple returned to France, where she broke off contact with Continental. They spent part of the war under house arrest in Megeve, a town in the French Alps. This lasted until Rubirosa was reported as making several anti-German statements, which led the couple to flee to Switzerland until the end of the war.     
As a result of this, she was seen as a collaborationist and sentenced to death by the French Resistance. In 1944, she and Rubirosa were ambushed by the resistance. Danielle was unharmed, but Rubirosa was wounded in the kidney. After the war the couple appealed to various French government offices, and the charges of collaboration were dropped. However, the damage was done and her career suffered as a result. Though she resumed making films in 1946, it took a couple of years before her career began to rebound. 

Once one of the highest paid actors in France, her salary plummeted in the late ‘40s. To supplement her income she returned to the stage, starring in a 1946 production of Tristan and Isolde, among others. She finally regained her former popularity with movie audiences in 1949 with Claude Autant-Lara’s farce Occupe-toi d’Amelie ..! (Keep an Eye on Amelia).

After the war she and Rubirosa moved to Rome, where he became the Dominican ambassador to Italy. While there they were visited by Doris Duke, who was working at the time as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service. The interview soon blossomed into a full-blown affair for Rubirosa and Duke, who carried on when Danielle was at work. 

“It (the affair) took me by surprise,” she said. “Rubi was great, but I learned that I had married the greatest playboy in the world. He loved women too much. When I discovered his affair, I immediately asked for a divorce. She had how many millions? And there I was, broke, living on my movie salaries. For him the choice wasn’t hard.”

It was rumored that Duke paid her $1 million to agree to a divorce and the couple divorced in 1947.

“Well, let’s just say that I was compensated,” she told me. “She made the offer and I accepted. I knew it was over anyway, and I really didn’t want him back. After the separation, he tried to seduce me again. Out of the question!”

But Danielle wasn’t alone for long. Brother Olivier introduced her to screenwriter Georges Mitsikidès and they married in the village of Osmoy in Yvelines in 1948. The marriage lasted until his death in 1991. To say it was a happy one is an understatement. “I was his only concern,” she said. “He did not work. He could have written, but Georges was totally devoted, he only loved Mathieu and me. We never left each other. He died in my arms.”

In 1956 they adopted a son, Mathieu, who died in 1997, leaving behind wife Sylvie and two sons, Thomas and Julien.

With Georges guiding her career things picked up for Danielle. Max Ophuls offered her a role in his episodic film, La Ronde (1950). The next year MGM cast her as Jane Powell’s mother in Rich, Young and Pretty (1951). Director Joseph Mankiewicz was so taken with her performance that he offered her the female lead opposite James Mason in 5 Fingers (1952), a riveting spy thriller based on a true story.

But as before, she preferred being in her homeland. Her last American film was Alexander the Great (1956). She played Queen Olympias, the mother of Alexander (Richard Burton), even though she was only eight years his senior.

Ophuls did not forget her. He cast her in Le Plaisir (1952), and as the lead, a beautiful, and adulterous countess opposite Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica in the exquisite The Earrings of Madame de… (1953). 

Danielle was extremely shy and modest in real life. Interviewing her at first was like pulling teeth, and it took a few sessions before she warmed up and began to trust me. Her modesty even extended to watching herself in a movie or television program, as she told me she couldn’t bear watching herself onscreen. But she said she did enjoy watching The Earrings of Madame de…because Ophuls was her favorite director. “I was adequate,” she said.

With the three films for Ophuls, and with Georges’ guiding hand, she returned to the mainstream. Her starring roles as Mme. de Renal in The Red and the Black (1954) and Constance Chatterly in Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1955) sealed her reputation in the first rank of French actresses.

One would assume that, like many French stars of the ‘30s and ‘40s she would be forgotten by the directors of the New Wave, but that wasn’t the case. Claude Chabrol cast her in his 1963 drama, Landru (aka Bluebeard, 1963) as one of the victims of the serial killer who met his victims through lonely hearts ads. 

Jacques Demy cast her in his 1966 musical, Les demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) as Yvonne Garner, mother of Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Francoise Dorleac, Deneuve’s real-life sister). Unlike the rest of the cast, Darrieux is the only performer who does her own singing. A concert singer, she recorded and sang many songs onscreen. As with every other aspect of her career she was extremely modest, attributing it to “a habit of producers, I suppose.” She would return to star – and sing – for Demy in his 1982 Une chambre en ville (A Room in Town), a musical reminiscent of the director’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) in that every line is sung.

Darrieux once told me that she was habitually lazy, but she continued working until she was 99, appearing in a 2016 tribute short. As she grew older, Danielle was no longer cast as the leading lady but as the star's mother and later, grandmother. She made nine films alone in the first decade of the 21st century, her last onscreen appearances were as Madeleine, the family matriarch, in the 2010 comedy Pièce Montée (The Wedding Cake), and as a Corsican grandmother in the 2011 television movie, C’est Toi C’est Tout, (It’s You, It’s Everyone).

Darrieux was a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and an officer of the Ordres des Arts et des Lettres, yet she never won a César Award (the French equivalent of the Oscar). She received an honorary César in 1985, usually a sign that one’s career is over. But she fooled everyone by being nominated twice: in 1987 at age 70 for Le lieu du crime (Scene of the Crime) and in 2002 at the age of 85 for the musical comedy Huit Femmes (8 Women), where she played a family matriarch whose daughters included Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Fanny Ardent.  

When not making a movie or singing in concert, Darrieux could be found on the stage. Over her career she appeared in many stage productions, acting in works by Noël Coward and Françoise Sagan, among others. She won plaudits for the 1995 played the ultimate older woman in a 1995 French production of Harold and Maude and at the age of 86 capped her stage career in 2003 as the star of 2003’s Oscar et la Dame Rose as an elderly hospital worker who helps a dying boy. She won the Molière, France’s national theater award.     

Danielle twice appeared on Broadway. In 1970 she took over for Katharine Hepburn in Coco, the Tony Award-nominated musical about the fashion designer Coco Chanel. Theater critic John Simon noted that “Hepburn played it indomitable, Danielle Darrieux plays it adorable.” Her only other Broadway appearance was with Howard Keel in the short-lived 1972 musical Ambassador.     

Her only survivor is her partner, Jenvrin. Her brother, Olivier Darrieux, who made his mark in France as a comic actor, died in 1994. Her sister, Claude Hussenot-Desenonges, died in 1998. She was buried at the cemetery of Marnes-la-Coquette, in the Hauts-de-Seine, where her beloved Georges is buried. To a reporter who asked her for the secret of her longevity, she answered: “A good head, good legs, a little whiskey from time to time, and not to be pissed off by anyone!”