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Jeanne Moreau, the actress known for her husky voice which captivated cinema audiences, was found dead at her home in Paris. Her death was confirmed by the office of President Emmanuel Macron. She died at the age of 89.
Moreau, whom journalists liked to call the thinking moviegoer’s femme fatale, first came to American audiences’ attention in Louis Malle’s 1958 drama “The Lovers.” The film included a lengthy love scene in which Ms. Moreau, playing a bored housewife having an affair, enacted a clearly orgasmic moment, considered scandalous at the time.
Macron, the French president, said in a statement on Monday: “We could say about Jeanne Moreau that a part of cinema legend is gone. But her whole work was precisely about never freezing her art into a mythology, and never locking herself into the respectable status of the ‘great actress.’ She had in her eye a sparkle that deflected deference and inspired insolence, freedom, the turbulence of life that she liked so much and that she will long make us like.”
Jeanne Moreau was born in Paris on Jan. 23, 1928, the daughter of the owner of a Montmartre hotel and restaurant and his British-born wife, a dancer at the Folies Bergère. Ms. Moreau decided to become an actress after seeing her first play, “Antigone,” when she was 15. When she told her father about her ambition, he slapped her.
His opposition was an advantage in her eyes. “It forces you toward excellence,” she told a reporter for the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2001. “All my life I wanted to prove to my father that I was right.”
In 1949, she married Jean-Louis Richard, a French actor and screenwriter, with whom she had a son (born the day after their wedding). That marriage lasted two years, as did her second (1977-79), to the American director William Friedkin.
She is survived by her son, Jérôme Richard, an artist.