Biography: life and films
Jacqueline Audry holds a significant place in French history as the first
woman director to have any impact on French cinema after WWII.
She only directed fifteen films, mostly literary adaptations, and her style
was already dated by the time the French New Wave came on the scene.
Audry may not have been a great innovator and most of her films today appear
pretty ordinary for their time, but she was ahead of her time in her depiction
of female sexuality and the female characters in her films are the most fully
developed of any French film made in the 1950s. Audry had some commercial
success but she was not a favourite of the critics - indeed she was lambasted
for the supposedly scandalous content of her films. Today, she is criminally
overlooked and her work deserves a far wider appreciation than it currently
has.
Born in Orange, France, on 25th September 1908, Jacqueline Audry attended
the Lycée Molière in Paris with her elder sister Colette Audry
(who would become a novelist and screenwriter). She started out in
the film business by working as an assistant to several distinguished directors,
including Max Ophüls (
Le
Roman de Werther (1938)), G.W. Pabst (
Jeunes filles en détresse
(1939)) and Georges Lacombe (
Les Musiciens du ciel
(1940)). It wasn't until 1943 that Audry directed her first film, a
short entitled
Les Chevaux du Vercors.
At the time Audry started making films, the French film industry was male
dominated and opportunities for women were few and far between. The
first feature that she directed -
Les Malheurs de Sophie (based on
the novel of the same title by the Countess of Ségur) - was heavily
censored and no longer exists. She followed this two years later with
Sombre dimanche (1948), and then had her first hit with
Gigi (1949), based on a popular novella
by Colette, an author she was extremely fond of. The film not only
made Audry's name as a director, it also made its lead actress, Danièle
Delorme, an overnight star. Audry and Delorme collaborated on two further
Colette adaptations,
Minne,
l'ingénue libertine (1950) and
Mitsou (1956), the latter of which
was widely condemned for its explicit depiction of a love affair outside
marriage.
Audry's best film is, arguably,
Olivia,
adapted from a partly autobiographical novel by Dorothy Bussy. Not
only is the film beautifully directed, scripted with depth and sensitivity
by the director's husband Pierre Laroche and sister Colette Audry, it also
broke new territory with its honest depiction of a lesbian relationship between
a school headmistress (played by a superb Edwige Feuillère) and one
of her students. Another inspired film was Audry's adaptation of Jean-Paul
Sartre's well-known play
Huis clos
(1954).
Le
Secret du chevalier d'Éon (1959), Audry's most lavish production,
makes a good historical romp but pales in comparison with her earlier work.
By the early 1960s, Jacqueline Audry had been overtaken by the Nouvelle Vague
and her attempts to keep up with changing tastes - such as her lame stab
at a comedic road movie,
Les
Petits matins - mostly fell flat. She directed one other notable
adaptation,
Fruits amers (1967), from a play by her sister, and contributed
some scenes to Renzo Cerrato's
Le Lys de mer (1969), before ending
her directing career with a Franco-Polish television serial on the life of
Honoré de Balzac,
Un grand amour de Balzac (1973). Jacqueline
Audry was 68 when she was killed in a road accident in Yvelines, France,
on 22 June 1977.
© James Travers 2017
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