Sunday, December 25, 2011

Maria Schneider, Remembered

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Magazine


Maria Schneider, b. 1952
By Susan Dominus
It was a plan conceived over a breakfast of bread and butter. Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of “Last Tango in Paris,” liked it, the assistant director liked it and so did the film’s star, Marlon Brando. They left it to Brando to break the news to his young co-star, Maria Schneider.
At the time, Schneider was 19, a runaway and a stoner with the bravado of a young woman who had been living on her own, modeling and acting, since she was 15. Brando was playing a grieving widower seeking solace in sex with a young woman whose name he didn’t know. Schneider played that woman, Jeanne, in a role that called for extensive nudity and explicit scenes with Brando, a middle-aged man coming off a decadelong downhill slide. If Schneider had reservations about the part, she was too young to say so, and she had no one to say it for her. She had fled her mother, and barely knew her father, a well-regarded French actor named Daniel Gélin — an old friend, it turned out, of Brando’s.
Most people become famous for something they do; Schneider became famous for what was done to her. Not long before filming, Brando told her they wanted to use the butter in a scene in which he would appear to be sodomizing her. Schneider was a product of ’60s youth culture, comfortable with her bisexuality, with full-frontal nudity, with provocation for the sake of art. But this was something that crossed even her own fairly fluid boundaries. “I instinctively felt I would be the one to suffer for it,” she later said.
Stills from “Last Tango in Paris.”
Ultimately, she relented; she did not feel she had a choice. In the scene, Brando, massive, lies on her facedown body. Schneider pounds her fists until Brando pins them down. Her face trembles, and she shakes her head, openly weeping. It was years before she publicly acknowledged that she “felt a little raped by Brando.”
“She was furious doing it — which was good for the movie,” recalls Fernand Moszkowicz, the assistant director of the film. Bertolucci sensed what Schneider was experiencing at the time. “She screams in part because she’s outraged at me and Marlon, who was for her a kind of father figure and who was often protecting her; I think she felt betrayed by both of us,” Bertolucci later said. “In the meantime,” he added, “I was ecstatic that I could use for that erotic purpose something that is on the breakfast table every morning.”
For all of its panting, X-rated hype, “Last Tango” has scenes that now play like comic sendups of ’70s-era male sexuality: Brando, glowering, all man, as he throws Jeanne’s hat aside, or lounging coyly against a wall, the suave playboy. We see a familiar staple of Brando’s past work, the explosive but sexy brutalizer, and in his softening middle, the Brando he would become. But Schneider, who never caught an audience’s eye that way again, feels fresh in every shot — postadolescent, pouty, giggling or, in some scenes, sobbing. If there are false notes in the movie, none belong to Schneider.
Brando’s reputation was revived by “The Godfather,” which was released about a month into the shooting of “Last Tango”; but it was “Last Tango” that made him millions. Schneider briefly became one of the most famous women in the world but made only $4,000 from the film. Brando retreated to his property in Tahiti; Schneider had nowhere to go, no way to hide from the scandalized press, from strangers who sent her butter at restaurants or the throng of teenage boys who chanted “butter” outside the hotel where she was staying in South America. Once unguarded, she became embittered toward the industry. “She lost that innocence, that wide-eyed kind of thing,” recalls a friend, the actress Patti D’Arbanville, who met her when they were living on their own in Paris.
Maria Schneider with Marlon Brando and
Bernardo Bertolucci, the director.
Photographs from Everett Collection.
Schneider had been using drugs for years — in 1973, she rolled a joint in the middle of a New York Times interview — but after the film appeared, she became a full-blown addict, abusing quaaludes, cocaine and heroin. She was offered dozens of oversexed scripts and turned them all down. She seemed intent on demonstrating that she would never again let a director push her around. Originally cast in Bertolucci’s next film, “Novecento,” she quit before shooting started. She walked off the set of another film to check into a mental asylum in Rome, in order to be with her girlfriend at the time, who had been sent there by the authorities. Although she won acclaim for her role in “The Passenger” with Jack Nicholson, the big film offers eventually stopped coming.
Schneider nearly died several times of drug overdoses, but by 1980, she had met the woman she called her “secret garden,” a screenwriter with whom she ultimately led a quiet life in a small apartment in Paris, with a circle of friends that included D’Arbanville and the photographer Nan Goldin. She managed to kick heroin; later she indulged only in red wine and cigarettes, and always Champagne. “After she once called and told me she needed money, I sent her a hundred-dollar gift card,” recalls an old friend, Penelope Spheeris, a director. “She called me later that night, tipsy, to thank me — here she is needing money, and she’d spent it all on a bottle of Champagne. It was so French. It was so Maria.”
For years, Bertolucci fended off suggestions that Schneider had been a victim on the set of “Last Tango in Paris.” “Both of them were more than 21,” he once said. “Or more than 18 anyway.” But after Schneider died of lung cancer at 58, Bertolucci seemed to have a change of heart. “Her death has come too early, before I could give her a tender embrace and tell her that I felt as connected to her as I was at the start and apologize to her at least once,” he said.
Schneider would probably have preferred the apology to the tender embrace. As it was, with age, she had found her own peace of mind. She acted in small films and dedicated herself to working with an organization that helped forgotten, aging actors stay afloat. “Growing older is a crime,” Jeanne says in “Last Tango.” For Schneider, it was what saved her life.
Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine.
Produced by MEGHAN LOUTTIT, SAMANTHA HENIG, YURI CHONG
Design by JOHN NIEDERMEYER, GAIL BICHLER, SARA CWYNAR |
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February 3, 2011, 3:43 pm

‘Last Tango in Paris’ Star Maria Schneider Dies

By WILLIAM GRIMES
The actress Maria Schneider with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.”Museum of Modern Art The actress Maria Schneider with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.”
Maria Schneider, the French actress whose sex scenes with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris” set a new standard for explicitness onscreen, died on Thursday in Paris. She was 58.
A spokesman for her agency, Act 1, said that she had died after a long illness but provided no other details.
The baby-faced Ms. Schneider was only 19 when the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci chose her above a hundred other actresses for the role of the free-spirited, mysterious Jeanne in “Last Tango” because, he once said, she seemed “like a Lolita, but more perverse.”
In the film, Jeanne enters into a brief but torrid affair with a recently widowed American, played by Brando. Their erotically charged relationship, played out in an empty apartment near the Bir Hakeim Bridge in Paris, shocked audiences on the film’s release in 1972, especially a scene in which Brando pins Ms. Schneider to the floor and, taking out a stick of butter, seems to perform anal intercourse on her. The Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an X rating.
The role fixed Ms. Schneider in the public mind as a figurehead of the sexual revolution, and she spent years trying to move beyond the role, and the public fuss surrounding it. “I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol,” she told The Daily Mail of London in 2007. “I wanted to be recognized as an actress, and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it.”
The famous butter scene, she said, was not in the script and made it into the film only at Brando’s insistence. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
Ms. Schneider later appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Passenger” (1975), directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni, and she went on to work with important directors like René Clément in “The Baby-Sitter” (1975) and Jacques Rivette in “Merry-Go-Round” (1981), but her film career remained a minor one after the early 1970s, in part because of a turbulent personal life that included drug abuse, at least one suicide attempt and messy affairs with both men and women.

A full obituary will appear later.

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'Last Tango in Paris' actress Maria Schneider had a turbulent life

February 3, 2011 |  2:11 pm
 
Tango
The word that Maria Schneider died Thursday in Paris at the age of 58 resonates with baby boomers. For them she was a pivotal sexual icon of their youth. In 1973, Schneider was the next big thing. The wildest of wild childs who embraced the sexual revolution with open arms. She was the female lead opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's X-rated "Last Tango in Paris."  Schneider was so overtly sexual she made Brigitte Bardot look like a nun.
The film made the cover of major magazines for its nudity and frank and often violent sexual scenes between Brando, who earned an Oscar nomination, and the then 20-year-old Schneider. No one looked at a stick of butter quite the same way after one classic scene.
Brando played a recent American widower whose wife had committed suicide; Schneider was the carefree Parisian engaged to marry a pompous young filmmaker (Jean-Pierre Leaud). Brando's Paul and Schneider's Jeanne meet at an apartment for rent, have a quick sexual encounter and decide to meet there again for anonymous encounters -- they know nothing about each other, including each other's  name.
The camera loved Schneider, as did most of the male audience members who went to the hit film, but she wasn't the first choice for the role -- Dominique Sanda was supposed to play the part but had to drop out when she got pregnant.
Schneider next showed up opposite Jack Nicholson in "The Passenger," directed by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1975. But her career languished shortly afterward.
Schneider, who was the illegitimate daughter of French actor Daniel Gelin ("The Man Who Knew Too Much"), had a turbulent life, as did her father, who had battled alcohol and drugs.
A bisexual who came out in 1974, she left the film set of "Caligula" in Rome in 1976 with a woman she said was her lover and checked herself into a mental hospital. She made headlines because of her drug and alcohol problems and suicide attempts during that decade, but apparently turned her life around in the 1980s.
She continued to work but rarely did her films show up in the U.S. One of the few exceptions was the 1996 version of "Jane Eyre." But looking far older than her years, it was hard to believe it was the same actress who had played Jeanne two decades before.
RELATED: Maria Schneider, actress in 'Last Tango in Paris,' dies at 58
-- Susan King
 Photo: Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in "Last Tango in Paris." Credit: Associated Press

Maria Schneider, actress in 'Last Tango in Paris,' dies at 58

ia Schneider, actress in 'Last Tango in Paris,' dies at 58


Maria Schneider (actress)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maria Schneider

Maria Schneider at Créteil Films de Femmes Festival in Paris 2001
BornMarie Christine Gélin
27 March 1952
Paris, France
Died3 February 2011 (aged 58)
Paris, France
Cause of deathCancer
NationalityFrench
EthnicityRomanian and French[1]
OccupationActress
Years active1969–2008
PartnerPia
ParentsDaniel Gélin (deceased)
Marie-Christine Schneider
Maria Schneider (born Marie Christine Gélin; 27 March 1952 – 3 February 2011) was a French actress. She was best known for playing Jeanne, opposite Marlon Brando, in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris.

Contents

 [hide] 

[edit] Career

Schneider performed several nude scenes in Last Tango in Paris, which was controversial at the time. In an interview in 2007,[2] she described Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci: "He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself, and would do certain things to get a reaction from me." As for her working relationship with Brando, she said that, while their relationship on the set was paternal, it was Brando who came up with the sodomy scene where butter was used as lubricant, and it was not revealed to her until just before it was filmed:
“I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that. Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.[2]”

“Last Tango ... first major role. In fact, it's a total coincidence. I was friends with Dominique Sanda. She would make the film with Jean-Louis Trintignant, but she was pregnant. She had a large picture with her of both of us. Bertolucci saw it. He made me do a casting...I regretted my choice since the beginning of my career would have been sweeter, quieter. For Tango, I was not prepared. People have identified with a character that was not me. Butter, about saucy old pigs...Even Marlon with his charisma and class, felt a bit violated, exploited a little in this film. He rejected it for years. And me, I felt it doubly.[3][4]”

Schneider and Brando remained friends until his death, although they did not speak of the movie "for a while." She also said that her experience with the film – and her treatment as a sex symbol rather than as a serious actress – motivated her never to work nude again. She also appeared in films such as Antonioni's The Passenger and Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre.
She worked in over 50 films and television productions between 1969 and 2008. During her career she was a strong advocate for improving the work of women in film.
“I'm still struggling for the image of women in film and I'm still working, not as much as I would like to because for a woman in her late forties, it's hard to find work. Not only in France. I had a chat with Anjelica Houston last year. We spoke about the same problem, you know. I don't know where it comes from? The writers, the producers, or the directors. But I think it's a pity even for the public. We get a response to see a mature woman in film. We see many, many macho men in film. An actress like Meryl Streep doesn't work as much as Bob De Niro.[5]”

In 2001, she was the guest of honor at the 23rd Festival Créteil Films de Femmes.[6] In a master class at the festival, she called film "a tracing of memory", and said that women must be recognized as actors and directors. She also brought attention to the importance of assisting senior French actors who become unemployed and impoverished. She was chosen to be Vice-President of La Roue Tourne, an organization in Paris designed for this purpose.[7] According to Schneider, Marcel Carné, director of Children of Paradise (1945) and one of the most important directors of the late 1930s, would have died in poverty. La Roue Tourne supported him for the last ten years of his life.
Schneider was awarded the medal of Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contributions to the arts on 1 July 2010 by Minister of Culture and Communication, Frédéric Mitterrand, who was her fellow actor in Jacques Rivette's film, Merry-Go-Round (1981 film), released in 1977.

[edit] Personal life

Schneider was the daughter of French actor Daniel Gélin and Romanian-born Marie-Christine Schneider, who ran a bookstore in Paris.[8] She met her father only three times and took her mother's last name. In 1974, Schneider came out as bisexual.[9][10] In early 1976, she abandoned the film set of Caligula and checked herself into a mental hospital in Rome for several days to be with her lover, photographer Joan Townsend.[11][12] This, coupled with her refusal to perform nude, led to Schneider's dismissal and she was replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy.
The 1970s were turbulent years for Schneider, marked by drug addiction, overdoses, and a suicide attempt. Schneider said that she disliked the instant fame accorded to her from Last Tango in Paris. She suffered abuse and began taking drugs.
“I was rock 'n' roll. About drugs, we did not know at the time, it was so dangerous. There was an ideal, to change society, and especially a thirst for novelty...I have lost seven years of my life and I regret it bitterly...I started using drugs when I became famous. I did not like the celebrity, and especially the image full of innuendo, naughty, that people had of me after Last Tango. In addition, I had no family behind me, who protect you...I suffered abuse. People who come up to tell you unpleasant things on planes. I was tracked down, and I felt hounded.[13][14]”

By the 1980s, however, her life had improved:
“"I was very lucky – I lost many friends to drugs – but I met someone in 1980 who helped me stop. I call this person my angel and we've been together ever since. I don't say if it's a man or a woman. That's my secret garden. I like to keep it a mystery."[2]”

Despite her "mystery" comment, Schneider's MySpace fan page indicates her "angel" turned out to be her long time companion Maria Pia Almadio, with photos of Pia at the funeral.
She died from cancer on 3 February 2011 at age 58.[15][16][17] Remembering her, Bertolucci said, "Her death came too soon, before I could hold her again tenderly, and tell her that I felt connected to her as on the first day, and for once, to ask her to forgive me."[18] "Maria accused me of having robbed her of her youth and only today am I wondering whether there wasn't some truth to that," he added.[19][20]
Her funeral was held on 10 February 2011 at Église Saint-Roch, Paris, attended by actors, directors and producers in French cinema such as Dominique Besnehard, Bertrand Blier, Christine Boisson, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Andréa Ferreol, as well as her surviving partner, Pia, half-siblings Fiona and Manuel Gélin, and her uncle, Georges Schneider. Delon read out a letter from Brigitte Bardot, who took care of the teenaged Schneider and helped her begin her career in cinema. Bardot wrote a moving tribute for the memorial at Église Saint Roch.[21] Schneider was cremated afterwards at Père Lachaise crematorium, and her ashes were later to be scattered at sea at the foot of the Rock of the Virgin in Biarritz, according to her last wishes.[22][23][24][25]

[edit] Filmography

  • The Chrismas Tree (uncredited), 1969
  • Les Femmes, 1969
  • The Love Mates, 1970
  • Les jambes en l'air, 1970
  • La Vieille fille, 1971
  • Hellé, 1971
  • What a Flash, 1972
  • Cari genitori (Dear Parents), 1972
  • Last Tango in Paris, 1972
  • Reigen (Dance of Love), 1973
  • La Baby Sitter (Scar Tissue), 1975
  • Professione: reporter (The Passenger), 1975
  • Violanta, 1977
  • Voyage au jardin des morts, 1978
  • Io sono mia (I Belong to Me), 1978
  • Haine (Hate), 1979
  • La Dérobade (Memoirs of a French Whore), 1979
  • Een Vrouw als Eva (A Woman Like Eve), 1979
  • Weiße Reise (White Travel), 1980
  • Mamma Dracula (Mother Dracula), 1980
  • Sezona mira u Parizu, 1981
  • La chanson du mal aimé, 1981
  • Merry-Go-Round, 1981
  • Looking for Jesus, 1982
  • Cercasi Gesù, 1982
  • Balles perdues (Stray Bullets), 1982
  • Princess and the Photographer, 1984
  • Buio nella valle (TV mini-series), 1984
  • A Song for Europe (TV movie), 1985
  • Résidence surveillée, 1987
  • L'or noir de Lornac (TV series), 1987
  • Silvia è sola (TV movie), 1988
  • Bunker Palace Hôtel, 1989
  • The Conviction, (1991)
  • Écrans de sable (Sand Screens), 1992
  • Au pays des Juliets (In the Country of Juliets), 1992
  • Savage Nights (Les Nuits fauves), 1992
  • Contrôle d'identité (TV movie), 1993
  • Navarro (TV series) (as Samira in one episode, L'ombre d'un père), 1995
  • Jane Eyre, 1996
  • Something to Believe In, 1998
  • Angelo nero (TV movie), 1998
  • Il cuore e la spada (TV movie), (Queen Maga of Ireland) 1998
  • Les Acteurs (Actors), 2000
  • The Repentant, 2002
  • Maigret (TV series), 2004
  • Au large de Bad Ragaz, 2004
  • Perds pas la boule! (Short), 2006
  • Quale amore, 2006
  • La vie d'artiste, 2007
  • La Clef (The Key), 2007
  • A.D. La guerre de l'ombre (TV mini-series), 2008
  • Cliente, 2008

[edit] References

  1. ^ Maria Schneider dies at 58; actress in 'Last Tango in Paris' Los Angeles Times, 4 February 2011. "The daughter of French actor Daniel Gélin and a Romanian mother, Schneider was born in Paris on 27 March 1952, and grew up with her mother near the French border with Germany."
  2. ^ a b c Das, Lina (19 July 2007). "I felt raped by Brando". Daily Mail. Retrieved 3 February 2011.
  3. ^ Moira Sullivan, "Maria Schneider: Forget Last Tango"(Translation of "Autoportrait: Maria Schneider: Belle et Rebelle"), Jackie Buet, Elizabeth Jenny, Créteil Films de Femmes, 2001[1]
  4. ^ Jackie Buet, Elizabeth Jenny,"Autoportrait: Maria Schneider: Belle et Rebelle"Créteil Films de Femmes, 2001,[2]
  5. ^ Moira Sullivan,"Interview with Maria Schneider Honored at the 23rd Créteil Films de Femmes International Film Festival, April 4, 2001.[3]
  6. ^ Jackie Buet, Elizabeth Jenny,"Maria Schneider: Belle et Rebelle",[4] Créteil Films de Femmes, 2001.
  7. ^ "La Roue Tourne"[5]
  8. ^ Klemesrud, Judy (4 February 1973). "Maria Says Her 'Tango' Is Not; Movies". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 May 2010.
  9. ^ Hadleigh, Boze (2001), The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films, Citadel Press, p. 81, ISBN 0806521996
  10. ^ Abrams, Richard M. (2006), America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2001, Cambridge University Press, pp. 165–6, ISBN 0521862469
  11. ^ Ebert, Roger (14 September 1975). "Interview with Maria Schneider". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 21 April 2007.
  12. ^ Maria Schneider Pt. 3: Memoirs of a French Whore, A Woman Like Eve Alt Film Guide, 3 February 2011.
  13. ^ Moira Sullivan, "Maria Schneider: Forget Last Tango" (Translation of "Autoportrait: Maria Schneider Belle et Rebelle"), 2 February2001.[6]
  14. ^ Jackie Buet, Elizabeth Jenny, "Autoportrait: Maria Schneider Belle et Rebelle"[7] Créteil Films de Femmes, 2001.
  15. ^ "Last Tango In Paris star Maria Schneider dies at 58". Daily Mail. 3 February 2011.
  16. ^ Maria Schneider obituary The Guardian, 3 February 2011.
  17. ^ Moira Sullivan,Tribute to Maria SchneiderSenses of Cinema, 14 March 2011.
  18. ^ Prigioniera di quell'"Ultimo tango"—Addio a Maria Schneider La Repubblica, 3 February 2011.
  19. ^ Bertolucci wanted to say sorry for 'Last Tango in Paris' France 24, 3 February 2011.
  20. ^ Remembering Maria Schneider The Daily Beast, 6 February 2011.
  21. ^ "Brigitte Bardot rend hommage à Maria Schneider", 10 February 2011[8]
  22. ^ Mort de Maria Schneider : Son dernier adieu Pure People, 2011-025-07.
  23. ^ Obsèques de Maria Schneider : L'hommage de Brigitte Bardot et Alain Delon Pure People 10 February 2011.
  24. ^ María Schneider; sin tangos pero con emoción en París Prensa Latina 10 February 2011.
  25. ^ Regardez l’adieu bouleversant à l’actrice disparue Gala Magazine 10 February 2011.

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