Marie-France Pisier

Marie-France Pisier was born in 1944 in Daclat, Indochina, where her father was serving as a colonial governor.   When she was 12, she and her family moved to France.  It was Mario Brun, a journalist on the newspaper Nice-Matin, who brought the 17-year-old Marie-France Pisier to the attention of the film director François Truffaut, who was looking for a young actress to play the female lead in Antoine et Colette (1962), a 30-minute segment of the portmanteau film L’Amour à 20 ans (1962).  Brun had only just spotted Pisier in an amateur dramatics production in Nice.  Truffaut was immediately taken by Pisier’s charm and intelligence and launched her acting career with a short film that was the sequel to his debut feature Les 400 coups (1959).  Over the following decade, Pisier took supporting roles in a dozen films and had become an established screen actress by the mid-1970s.

In the course of her 50-year long career, Marie-France Pisier appeared in around 70 films and worked with some of France’s great auteur filmmakers, including many leading lights of the French New Wave (François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Jacques Demy).  She both co-scripted and co-starred in Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and featured in several of André Techiné’s early films, including Souvenirs d’en France (1975) and Barocco (1976), both of which won her a César.  

Pisier’s international breakthrough came with Jean Charles Tacchella’s Cousin, cousine (1975), which was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic.  The actress attempted to make a name for herself in America, with Charles Jarrott’s The Other Side of Midnight (1977) and the TV series The French Atlantic Affair (1979), but with little success,  Returning to France, her acting career went from strength to strength in the late 70s and 1980s, and she was sought after by both auteur and mainstream filmmakers.  One of her most popular films was Gérard Oury’s L’As des as (1982), a family-friendly comedy in which she starred opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo and which attracted an audience of over five million spectators in France.

In the latter part of her career, Marie-France Pisier was a passionate advocate of the seventh art and was willing to lend her talents to inexperienced filmmakers, including: Stéphane Giusti (Pourquoi pas moi?, 1999), Thierry Boscheron (Sur un air d’autoroute, 2000), and Yamina Benguigui (Inch’Allah Dimanche, 2001).  She also directed two films of her own: Le Bal du gouverneur (1990) and Comme un avion (2002).  Her final film appearance was in the popular comedy Il reste du jambon? (2010).  She died on 24th April 2011, aged 66, having apparently drowned in the swimming pool at her home in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, in the Var department of southeast France.