The great French actress who just turned 100 this past May has passed away. In honor of her centenary, there were a couple of great pieces written about her at the time, the main one being my friend Dan’s appreciation of her for Ebert: Cinematic Immortality: Danielle Darrieux Turns 100.
Dan writes:
Darrieux was the centerpiece in one of the greatest films ever made, Ophuls’s tragic romance “The Earrings of Madame de…” (1953). She does a very funny walk in the opening scenes as she goes to sell the earrings that will keep coming back to her, moving forward breathlessly and with a sort of physical wobble that is close to Marilyn Monroe’s comically “feminine” gait. In most of her movies, Darrieux puts quotation marks around her own behavior to stylize it, and she does that in the first half of “Madame de…” before plunging herself headlong into the annihilating emotion of the second part of the film.
“Madame de…” is a movie that says that you can’t get by on charm forever, and if you lead a superficial life you might eventually be made to pay a price. When her pampered, materialistic character is opened up to love for Fabrizio Donati (Vittorio De Sica), Darrieux does not act the situation but seems to be actually feeling and living it herself; she reaches a height of emotion when she leans against a door and desperately and ironically says, “I don’t love you, I don’t love you” to Donati. This is a film in which Darrieux herself has to interrogate her own charm and set it aside for something far deeper and more perilous. She rises to the occasion, especially in the last scenes where she has succumbed to her love for Donati as if it were a physical illness and her face keeps falling into a romantically obsessed stare.
It is one of the greatest performances of all time in one of the greatest movies of all time.
