Claude Jade, byname of
Claude Marcelle
Jorré (8 October 1948 – 1 December 2006) was a French
actress, best known by starring fictional character
Christine Darbon-Doinel in
François Truffaut's films
Baisers volés (1968),
Domicile conjugal (1970)
and
L'amour en fuite
(1979).
From stage to François Truffaut
The
daughter of a professor, she spent three years at Dijon
's
Conservatory of Dramatic Art, where in 1964, she won a best actress
prize for her portrayal of Agnès in Molière's L'école des femmes and in
1966 the "Prix de comédie" for Jean
Giraudoux' Ondine, which was performed at the "Comédie
Boulogne". She subsequently moved to Paris and became a
student of
Jean-Laurent Cochet
at the Edouard VII theater, and also began acting in a number of
television productions, including a role as Sylvie Massonneau in TV
series
Les oiseaux rares (The Rare Birds). It was while
she was performing as Frida in
Pirandello's
Henri IV as part of
Sacha Pitoëff's production at the
Théâtre Moderne that Claude Jade was discovered by
François Truffaut, who was
"completely taken by her beauty, her manners, her kindness, and her
joie de vivre" and cast her in the role of Christine Darbon in
Stolen Kisses (1968). During
the working for
Stolen Kisses Jade and Truffaut were
engaged at one point.
Stolen Kisses earned great acclaim,
and placed Jade in the international spotlight, thanks to her
strong performance, at most her teaching Antoine the best way to
butter toast in the morning, their writing each other little notes.
The American critic
Pauline Kael
remarked that Claude Jade "seems a less ethereal, more practical
Catherine Deneuve." It was the
first of three movies by Truffaut in which she appeared.
French cinema
Claude Jade reprised her role as Christine,
Antoine Doinel's girlfriend and then wife, in
Truffaut's movies
Bed &
Board and
Love
on the Run. In
Bed & Board she gave a
critically acclaimed performance, both comic sad. Mindful that
Antoine is having an affair with a Japanese beauty, Christine decks
herself out as a faux Madame Butterfly to greet him one evening in
their apartment. In French cinema, she starred successfully in
Edouard Molinaro's
Mon oncle Benjamin as
Jacques Brel's fiancée Manette, in the 70th as
Eleonore in
Gérard Brach's
The Boat on the Grass
(
Vincent Canby wrote: "Adorable
Acting, especially by Claude Jade, who brings the right mixture of
conventionalism and self-interest into her role."), as
Annie Girardot's and
Jean Rochefort's daughter Laura, who falls in
Love with
Bernard Fresson in
Hearth Fires
(1972), as Françoise, the Love of the Catholic priest
Robert Hossein in
Forbidden Priests
(1973), as charming widow and single mother Dominique, who falls in
love with her son's teacher, in
The Pawn (1978) and many
others. Claude Jade has often appeared in TV productions. She
starred - as Véronique d'Hergemont - in the television series
The Island of Thirty
Coffins (1979), one of her biggest successes. In cinema
she also has starred in dual roles in
Le Choix (1975) and
in
Lise et Laura (1982).
International career
Claude
Jade often worked outside of France, including the USSR
, the USA,
and Japan.
She starred as Michèle Picard in
Alfred
Hitchcock's
Topaz,
as the anxious secret agent's daughter married to a reporter
(
Michel Subor). Hitchcock engaged the
19-year-old French actress, and her first day for shooting
Topaz was her 20th birthday. She and
Dany Robin, cast as her mother, would provide the
glamor in the story. "Claude Jade is a rather quiet young lady,"
Hitchcock said later, "but I wouldn't guarantee [that] about her
behavior in a taxi". Hitchcock said also she has a resemblance to
Grace Kelly, in France she was a younger
Danielle Darrieux. Her big scene
in "Topaz" evokes a forgotten feminine delicacy; at the first sight
of a dead body, she staggers, hand on heart. Some of her scenes - a
duel at Stade Charléty, a scene in a car, a short scene in a hotel
and a cocktail-dinner at the spy Granville - were deleted and
restored for the 17 minutes longer "Director's Cut" of
Topaz in 1999. When Universal offered her an exclusive
seven year contract, she refused because she has preferred to work
in her own language. The non-exclusive contract was canceled (like
at the same time
Katharine Ross and
Joanna Shimkus).
She never returned to Hollywood:
Tony
Richardson started to shoot the movie
Nijinsky's Live,
based on a screenplay by
Edward Albee
and starring Claude Jade as
Vaslav
Nijinsky's wife Romola de Pulszky beside
Rudolf Nureyev as Nijinsky and
Paul Scofield as his lover Diaghilev, but
Albert Broccoli canceled the project
during its early stages. In Truffaut's
Bed and Board there is a reference to
Nureyev, when Christine admires him in three scenes. When Claude
Jade was planned to play
Anne Boleyn
beside
Richard Burton in
Anne of the Thousand Days,
she starred for
Édouard
Molinaro's
My uncle
Benjamin and
Geneviève
Bujold got the part.
Her last appearance in USA was as a guest star in the TV series
The Hitchhiker
in 1990.
Her international career continued in Belgium, where she played in
1969 a young English teacher who is his witness to a murder and is
as fatally intrigued by the murderer in
The Witness, followed by
Home Sweet
Home, in which she played a hard nurse under the influence
of the home director and who is changed by a love affair with a
social worker played by
Jacques
Perrin - and
Le Choix in the dual role of two
different women.
Claude Jade starred in Italian
in
Number one, La ragazza di via Condotti and
Una spirale di nebbia.
The
Japanese director Kei Kumai engaged her as
Nun Maria Teresa in Kita No Misaki - Cape of North, the
German director Gabi Kubach engaged her for Rendez-vous in
Paris and during the early 80s she also starred in two
Soviet
movies.
The 1980s
Lenin in Paris
In the
1980s Jade settled for three years in Moscow with her
diplomat-husband and her son Pierre Coste (born in 1976) and
subsequently spent three years in Cyprus
.
In this period, she starred in two Russian films, as the mysterious
terrorist Françoise in
Teheran
43 and as
Bolshevik Inessa Armand in
Lenin in Paris).
She also appeared in TV movies (
L'amie d'enfance,
Treize,
La grotte aux loups,
Nous ne l'avons
pas assez aimée,
Au bout du chemin,
Voglia di
volare) and in films as a philosophy teacher in
Le bahut
va craquer, as lawyer Valouin in
A Captain's Honor,
as Evelyne Droste in German movie
Rendez-vous in Paris, as
Marelle in
Une petite fille dans les tournesols and as
Alice in
L'homme qui n'était pas là. During the time at
Nicosia, she also played on stage in Lyon.
The 1990s
During the 1990s Jade worked more in television, as Sylvie in the
TV series
La tête en l'air, in a guest-starring role in
The Hitchhiker
episode "Windows", in which she shoots down her co-star
David Marshall Grant and in some TV
movies (
L'Éternité devant soi,
Au bonheur des
autres,
Porté disparu and others). During that time,
she made some notable screen appearances: She starred as Gabrielle,
a mother betrayed by her husband, in
Honor Roll. This was followed by her
performance as shy lesbian Caroline in
Jean-Pierre Mocky's
Bonsoir. In order to save her inheritance,
Caroline tells her aunt that her lover Gloria (Corinne Le Poulain)
is her secretary and Alex (
Michel
Serrault) her lover. In 1998, she played a governor's wife,
Reine Schmaltz, who saves herself on a lifeboat in the historical
movie
The Raft of the
Medusa)
On stage
On stage
she was a member of Jean Meyer's theatre company in Lyon
, appearing
in plays by Jean Giraudoux (Helena in
La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu-The Trojan war will not take
place and Isabelle in Intermezzo), Henry de Montherlant (Port
Royal), James Joyce (The
Exiles), Jean Racine
(Britannicus) and Honoré
de Balzac (Le Faiseur). She took other notable
roles in plays by Vladimir Volkoff (
The Interrogation),
Catherine Decours (
Regulus 93), Michel Vinaver
(
Dissident il va sans dire),
Alfred de Musset (
Lorenzaccio) and
others.
She was engaged on stages in Lyon, Nantes
, Dijon and Paris
. Many
plays were adapted for TV, such as her performances as Helena in
Shakespeares Midsummer Night's Dream, her
Sylvie in
Marcel Aymés Les
oiseaux de lune, her Colomba in
Jules
Romains' adaptation of Ben Johnson's
Volpone, her Clarisse in Jacques Deval's
I've Loved You So
Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime) (2008), her title
role in Supervielles
Sheherazade and her
Louise de La Vallière in
Le
château perdu.
Her last stage role was in
Jacques
Rampal's
Celimene and the Cardinal, a new Play in
Alexandrins based on
Molières
characters from
Le
Misanthrope, Célimène and Alceste, performed in Paris and
at festivals in 2006.
Last years
From 1998 to 2000 she was the leading actress of the television
series
Tide of Life (
Cap
des Pins) as "Anna Chantreuil".
From the late 1990s onward she starred in several made-for-TV
movies ("Le bonheur des autres", "Porté disparue", "
Sans famille"...) and TV-series like
Cap des Pins (leading role
from 1998 to 2000),
La tête en l'air,
Fleur
bleue,
Une femme d'honneur,
Inspecteur
Moretti,
Julie Lescaut,
Navarro,
La Crim (episode "Le secret" in 2004),
and
Groupe Flag (episode
Vrai ou faux in 2005).
In the 2000s she also starred in short films (
Drugs!,
A San Remo) and acted on
stage (as Maria Soderini in
Lorenzaccio and as Célimène in
Célimène
et le cardinal).
Her autobiography,
Baisers envolés, was released in March
2004. Her last stage role as Célimène she has performed until
August 2006. She died of
eye cancer
in December 2006, which had spread to her
liver, leaving behind her husband,
French diplomat Bernard Coste, whom she married in 1972, and her
son Pierre (born in 1976).
Awards
In 1970
she won an award for Révelation de la Nuit du cinéma, and
in 1975 she received the Prix Orange at the Cannes Festival
. Her many contributions to French culture
were recognised in 1998, when she was named a Knight in the
Légion d'honneur. In 2000 she
received the New Wave Award at West Palm Beach International Film
Festival for her "trend-setting role in the world cinema", followed
in 2002 by
Prix Réconnaissance des Cinéphiles in
Puget-Théniers.
Selected filmography
- Lenin in Paris
(1980)
- Teheran 43 (1980)
- The Island of
Thirty Coffins (TV-series, 1979)
- L'amour en
fuite (Love on
the Run, 1979)
- Le Pion (The Pawn, 1978)
- La passion de Lucile
Desmoulins (1978, TV)
- Spiral of Mist
(1977)
- Kita No Misaki
(Cape of North, 1976)
- Le Collectionneur
des cerveaux (1975)
- Malicious Pleasure
(1975)
- Le Choix
(The Choice,
1975)
- Too Much is Too
Much (1974)
- La ragazza di via
Condotti (Special
Killers, 1974)
- Forbidden Priests
(1973)
- Number One
(1973)
- Home sweet
Home (1973)
- Hearth Fires
(1972)
- Shéhérazade (1971)
- Boat on the Grass
(1971)
- Domicile conjugal
(Bed & Board,
1970)
- Topaz (1969)
- Mon oncle Benjamin
(My Uncle Benjamin,
1969)
- Le Témoin
(A Change of
Heart, 1969)
- Sous le signe de
Monte-Cristo (Under the Sign of Monte
Cristo, 1968)
- Baisers Volés
(Stolen Kisses, 1968)
References
Bibliography
- Jade, Claude. Baisers envolés. France: Milan, 2004.
ISBN 2745912410
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