Forty years after her death, Romy Schneider remains more present than ever in the hearts of the oldest, but also in that of the new generation.
The regular distribution of the films in which she was the headliner, cultivates the myth of an actress who did not imagine such posterity.
She just wanted to do her job, the best she could.
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Discover the “Best of the Goncourt Prize” collection
Read alsoDiscover here the program “Cinepanorama” with Romy Schneider
She explains it very simply in
Cinépanorama
, the first television magazine devoted to the seventh art, broadcast in the 1950s/1960s on the only channel still in black and white.
François Chalais and Frédéric Rossif were the project managers.
The latter produced the sequence, where interviewed by France Roche, a pioneer of “cinema” journalists on the small screen, Romy takes stock of her young career.
Madelen invites you to discover this interview where she talks about
Sissi
, who opened the doors of glory to her, Alain Delon, whose life she then shared, but also Luchino Visconti, whom she considers to be her mentor, the one who allowed her to trust her.
She met him in 1959, in Rome, on the set where he directs Delon in
Rocco and his brothers
.
Having come to spend a few days with her fiancé, she sympathizes so much with the Italian director that he ends up talking to her about a project dear to his heart: to stage in a Parisian room, the adaptation of an English play by John Ford,
Too bad she's a p…
.
Read alsoRomy Schneider, a demanding and modest star
He has been looking for a long time for the couple capable of playing this story of an incestuous love between Giovanni and his sister Annabella.
He had a flash: these two great roles must be interpreted by Alain and Romy!
For the latter, who has always dreamed of doing theatre, it seems impossible to refuse such an adventure!
And yet, she hesitates, and not only because the French in which she expresses herself is still uncertain.
She knows that she is taking the risk of betting her future on double or quits.
No one will forgive him for failure.
Visconti immediately sets things straight: he's going to help her as much as possible, but he won't let her miss anything, in order to give her the best chance of winning this bet.
He will keep his word.
He the
requires taking particularly intensive French lessons and phonetics lessons.
He makes her recite the alphabet for hours and
Les Fables
de la Fontaine, entrusts her to Raymond Gérôme for long rehearsals of the text, to which he adds others so that she brings out, on the set, what she has deep within herself.
On the eve of the premiere at the Théâtre de Paris, exhausted by endless days and sleepless nights, Romy physically breaks down.
Victim of peritonitis, she spent a week in the hospital.
She manages to regain the strength which, fifteen days later, allows her, after a first triumph, to be crowned Queen of Paris.
In 1962, Visconti engaged him again in a sketch film,
Boccace 70
.
One role among many others evoked in a series of documentaries proposed by Madelen: testimonials in the form of interviews about an actress who gave us moments of happiness after which she ran for a long time without really reaching , alas, to catch up with him.