Michele Morgan

Simone Rousell, artistically known as Michèle Morgan, was born in Neuille sur Seine, France, on a leap year, on February 29, 1920. Eager to be an actress, at the age of fifteen she traveled to Paris at the urging of a friend who said he could introduce her to important people from the world of cinema; Her plan did not please her father, but she did count on her maternal complicity. So with the excuse of a beauty contest, the teenager traveled to the French capital, where she met the actor George Rigaud , thanks to which she was able to debut as an extra in Mademoiselle Mozart (1936). It was not a role with dialogue, but it was a beginning, and in El pequeñuelo , from that same year, she already uttered her first movie sentence.

This blonde actress with an aristocratic bearing would continue to train as an actor under the tutelage of René Simon, and the gravity that she knew how to imprint on her roles would later earn her comparisons with Greta Garbo . The first person to notice her seriously is Marc Allégret and her file for Gribouille (1937), where she shares the bill with Raimu.

Undoubtedly, his first important film was Dock in Mists (1938), together with Jean Gabin , directed by Marcel Carné , a film with hypnotic qualities due to the fog that surrounds the entire narrative, about the love between a deserter and a woman. young man who has run away from home. “You know you have beautiful eyes, don’t you?” is a legendary phrase that Gabin addressed to Morgan. From the same year is Tormenta , where his partner in love tribulations is Charles Boyer , directed by Marc Allégret. The age of majority is marked not only by her eighteen years, but by her cinematographic maturity, Morgan is already a star, and it is normal for them to grant him leading roles, as is the case with La loi du nord( Jacques Feyder ) and L’entraîneuse ( Albert Valentin ), both from 1939. With Gabin he shines again in 1941 in the outstanding Remorques .

With the outbreak of war, it’s time to cross the pond and try the American adventure. In Hollywood he shoots Joan of France ( Robert Stevenson , 1942), a title with a war setting alongside Paul Henreid , the Laszlo of Casablanca . Curious thing, because Morgan was thought to play the role of Elsa in that film, which Ingrid Bergman would finally play . And even more curious, in 1944 she would make her, together with Humphrey Bogart , A Passage to Marseille , a film cut by the same pattern as the Casablanca that eluded her. The actress, during the Second World War, would add propaganda films to keep the spirits of the population high, such asUntel père et fils ( Julien Duvivier , 1943) and Two Tickets to London ( Edwin L. Marin , 1943). Also in 1943 she made Higher and Higher , where she shared the screen with a very young Frank Sinatra .

In 1942, she married an actor without much renown, William Marshall . She had a son with him -the little-known actor Mike Marshall , who died in 2005-, but they divorced in 1948, her break with a Hollywood that did not give her the desired success would also mean the end of her marriage. In 1950 she would marry the actor Henri Vidal , with whom she coincided on the screen in titles such as Fabiola and The Devil Always Loses , but Vidal would die unexpectedly at the age of 40 from a heart attack. The following year she would marry another filmmaker, Gérard Oury , with whom she remained until his death in 2006; Oury directed her in films such as Le crime ne paie pas (1962).

The actress returned home once the war was over, and there she really tasted the sweetness of success with The Pastoral Symphony ( Jean Delannoy , 1946), which adapted the well-known work by André Gide about the relationship between a blind young woman and a shepherd. Protestant, and which gave her the award for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Two years later she would come her work for Carol Reed ‘s The Fallen Idol , which adapted a story by Graham Greene , a splendid look at the death of her childhood. Following the European journey, she would shoot under the orders of Alessandro Blasetti Fabiola (1949), a film set in ancient Rome. She and she would repeat with Delannoy in 1950 with Aux yeux de souvenir, in 1952 with La minute de verité -here reuniting with Jean Gabin-, in 1954 with Obsession , and in 1956 with Marie Antoinette, Queen of France , but the result was clearly inferior to that of The Pastoral Symphony . Other directors he frequented are Yves Allégret -with whom he made the wonderful The Proud Ones (1953)- and René Clair -with whom he was able to print the necessary tragic note to what seemed like a light story in The Maneuvers of Love (1955). And it would be Josefina in Napoleón (1955 ) by Sacha Guitry .

As the 1950s progressed, Morgan’s star faded somewhat. She continues to have leading roles, but the films in which she is involved are of less interest, although it is worth noting Le miroir à deux faces (1958), which over time would have a remake where her role would be assumed by Barbra Streisand . Among what follows in the 60s, Landru (1963) stands out, where Claude Chabrol follows the adventures of the famous murderer. In 1966 he is in a Hollywood war production that is shot in Hoyo de Manzanares (Madrid), Mando perdido, but it is nothing special despite directing Mark Robson . Benjamin, Diary of an Innocent(1968), directed by Michel Seville, can be considered his swan song, from that moment his performances would be sporadic and brief, one of them in They’re all fine (1990), by Giuseppe Tornatore . In France, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, and on two occasions she was required to be part of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. She would also publish her autobiography, “Avec ces yeux là”, that is, “There with these eyes” in 1977, and would develop an unexpected facet as an abstract art painter. In 1992 she would be awarded a César honor for her entire career, and she too in Venice would be honored with a Golden Lion in 1996.