From 400 Blows to Amélie Poulain: Claire Maurier has left us
Also featured in La Cuisine au Beurre, La Cage aux Folles and Un Air de Famille, she died at the age of 97.
Actress Claire Maurier died on Sunday at the age of 97, her husband announced to AFP on Monday.
A familiar face of French cinema, she will have spanned several generations of spectators, from the New Wave to the popular successes of the 2000s.
Born in 1929, she entered the Bordeaux Conservatory at just 16 years old, where she won a first prize in comedy and a second prize in tragedy. She quickly debuted in the cinema, under the direction of Édouard Molinaro, who directed it five times. From 1957, in Back to the wallhe made it run alongside Jeanne Moreau. But it was in 1959 that she made a place for herself in French cinema as the demanding and distant mother of Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, in The 400 Blows by François Truffaut. This emblematic role propelled her to the forefront and opened the doors to the Cannes Film Festival, where she walked the red carpet at the age of 28.
His career continued with notable supporting roles, notably in Butter Cooking by Gilles Grangier, where she plays Bourvil’s wife and Fernandel’s ex, or even as Ninon de Lenclos in Wonderful Angelique (1965).
It then appears in The Crazy Cage (1978), where she plays Simone Deblon, the ex-wife of the character played by Ugo Tognazzi. Just after, in 1981, she received her only César nomination for A Bad Sonby Claude Sautet.
Less popular in cinema in the years that followed, she returned in A family resemblance by Cédric Klapisch (1996), where she plays the grumpy mother of Jean-Pierre Bacri, Agnès Jaoui and Wladimir Yordanoff.
A new generation rediscovered it in 2001 thanks to Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, where she plays Madame Suzanne, the owner of the Deux Moulins café in Montmartre.
She said goodbye to cinema in 2010 with The Tête en friche by Jean Becker, where she once again plays a cantankerous mother, this time that of Gérard Depardieu.
