Danielle Darrieux, French Film Star Over 8 Decades, Is Dead at 100
By Anita Gates | New York Times Oct. 19, 2017
Danielle Darrieux, the French actress and singer whose career of sophisticated film roles spanned eight decades and indelible incarnations as ingénue, coquette, femme fatale and grande dame, died on Tuesday at her home in Bois-le-Roi, France, south of Paris. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed by the French culture ministry. Ms. Darrieux’s companion, Jacques Jenvrin, told the French news media that she had been unwell since a recent fall.
When the Cinémathèque Française à Paris honored Ms. Darrieux with a retrospective in 2009, more than 90 of her films were screened, yet at least a score were left out. If Ms. Darrieux — who was beloved by her countrymen as D. D. long before anyone thought of calling Brigitte Bardot B. B. — had a career prime, it was the 1950s, in which she typified the desirable European married woman.
Three of her films from that decade were considered so risqué that they were not shown in the United States at first. She was the unfaithful bourgeoise in “La Ronde” (1950), an upscale Paris matron who takes a caddish young artist as her lover in “Adorable Créatures” (1952), and the sexually frustrated aristocrat’s wife in “L’Amant de Lady Chatterley” (1955), better known to English audiences as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
24 Femmes Per Second 