Yesterday, French actress and singer Marie La Forêt died at the age of 80. She was beautiful: sultry, sensual, passionate, intelligent, witty and…complicated. A woman of substance. A woman of style. Une femme de caractère.
Born Maïtena Marie Brigitte Doumenach in South West France to parents with Armenian roots, she played in 35 films, sold more than 35 million albums, starred in several stage productions, ran an art gallery and wrote…and she found time for 5 marriages and divorces and 3 children too. “I got married, I got divorced, I suffered, I cried, I threw myself into a nervous breakdown. Oh, it was marvellous”, she said. Dark humour and self-depreciation were her trademarks.
They called her ‘The Girl with the Golden Eyes’ after one of her best-loved films (they were actually heavenly hazel). She didn’t mind, she told the Figaro: “if they’d called me ‘The Girl with the Big Bottom’, then I would have been really upset”. Top of my list to see, or see again, are Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), A Cause, A Cause d’une Femme (Because, Because of a Woman ) Les Morfalous (The Vultures), Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha (The Blue Panther), Fucking Ferdinand (no translation necessary) and Les Bureaux de Dieu (God’s Offices) - the titles alone make me want to slip into a cosy French cinema and stay with her all day.
I’m not sure many people outside France have even heard of Marie La Forêt. The English tend to shun French films unless they’re diehard cinefiles, and they’re quick to rubbish anything that resembles French Pop. But so was she: while European and American folk truly inspired her, she was embarrassed about her sha la la la covers of “The House of the Rising Sun” and “Go Tell it to the Mountain” and classics by Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan and the Stones. But just imagine you’re living France in the 60s and you’ll understand why they were so huge. She gave French Chanson a new edge. “I don’t have a singing voice, I have a timbre” she said. And it was an irresistible one too. Her tunes pull on my heartstrings, I sing them in the shower: “Manchester & Liverpool”, “Ivan Boris & Moi” and “Il a neigé sur Yesterday”, a ballad about the Beatles breaking up…
Marie La Forêt settled in Geneva in Switzerland where she found her “interior convent", and she travelled, often alone, to Turkey, Latin America, Israel…She was always chasing freedom, artistic freedom, or just the freedom to be herself. In later life, she revealed she’d been raped at the age of three by a neighbour, a trauma she’d stifled and channelled through her screen persona for years. The good news is that she died as she wished, as a femme libre. Maïtena Marie Brigitte Doumenach - RIP.
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