French actor, novelist and director who starred in films by Truffaut and Buñuel Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel’s first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France. Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut’s enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L’Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine’s stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine’s heart. Léaud and Pisier were born in the same month and were both 18 when they appeared in the film. Pisier was discovered by a casting director, who had been instructed by Truffaut that: “Jean-Pierre Léaud’s partner must be a real young girl, not a Lolita, not a biker type, nor a little woman. She must be fresh and cheerful. Not too sexy.” Colette, who treats Antoine like a “buddy”, much to his frustration, runs into him again briefly in Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) and, finally, in the last film of the series, L’Amour en Fuite (Love On the Run, 1979), which she co-wrote. By then Colette was a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, but far more emotionally mature. The film contained what Truffaut called “real flashbacks”, when we see the differences between Pisier in her screen debut and Pisier 17 years and more than 20 films later, when she was midway through a prestigious career. She worked with such auteurs as Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz, appearing in quality French mainstream movies, with a short and unhappy detour to Hollywood. Pisier was born in French Indochina, now Vietnam, where her father served as colonial governor. She moved to Paris with her family when she was 12. While starting out in films, she completed degrees in jurisprudence and political science at Paris University. After she had appeared in several mediocre genre films, including thrillers directed by the actor Robert Hossein, Pisier’s career took a more interesting turn. In 1974, she appeared in the most outrageous and amusing sequence in Buñuel’s penultimate film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté (The Phantom of Liberty), where she is among the elegant guests seated on individual lavatories around a table from which they excuse themselves to go and eat in a little room behind a locked door. In the same year, in Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), Rivette’s brilliantly allusive comic meditation on the nature of fiction, she and Bulle Ogier act out, in a stylised and exquisite manner, a creaky melodrama in a mysterious house. Pisier was cast by the director André Téchiné in several of his early films, including Barocco (1976), for which she won a César award for her supporting role as a prostitute with a baby in tow. She later played Charlotte Brontë, alongside Isabelle Adjani (as Emily) and Isabelle Huppert (as Anne) in Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979). Her performance as a frivolous, neurotic wife in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin Cousine (1975), a hit in the US, led to her starring role in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), a Hollywood soap opera in which she almost overcame the cliches as a naive French girl who, betrayed by an American pilot, begins to use men for their money and power. But subsequently, apart from French Postcards (1979), in which, according to the critic Roger Ebert, “Marie-France Pisier, her jet-black hair framing her startling red lipstick, is the kind of dark Gallic woman-of-a-certain-age who knocks your socks off”, she was little seen in English-language movies. Among the rare exceptions was Chanel Solitaire (1981), in which she portrayed the designer Coco Chanel with her usual elegance. She made a splendid Madame Verdurin in Ruiz’s Proust adaptation, Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and was ethereal in the same director’s magical Combat d’Amour en Songe (2000). More recently, she was an iconic presence in Christophe Honoré’s homage to the French new wave, Dans Paris (2006). Pisier also directed two films, Le Bal du Gouverneur (The Governor’s Party, 1990), starring Kristin Scott Thomas and adapted from Pisier’s own novel about some of her childhood spent in New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Comme un Avion (Like an Airplane, 2002), a family drama based on the death of her own parents. Pisier was an outspoken defender of women’s rights and legal abortion. She overcame breast cancer in the 1990s. Her first husband was the lawyer Georges Kiejman, with whom she had a son. She is survived by her second husband, Thierry Funck-Brentano, a businessman; her brother, Gilles; and her sister, Evelyne. • Marie-France Pisier, actor, writer, director, born 10 May 1944; died 24 April 2011 France Europe Ronald Bergan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …French actor, novelist and director who starred in films by Truffaut and Buñuel Those who followed the adventures of Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) in a series of lyrical and semi-autobiographical films directed by François Truffaut – incorporating adolescence, marriage, fatherhood and divorce – will know that Doinel’s first and (perhaps) last love, Colette Tazzi, was played by the stunningly beautiful Marie-France Pisier, who has been found dead aged 66 in the swimming pool of her house near Toulon, in southern France. Doinel and audiences first caught sight of Pisier in Antoine et Colette, Truffaut’s enchanting 32-minute contribution to the omnibus film L’Amour à Vingt Ans (Love at Twenty, 1962), during a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. She is conscious of Antoine’s stares, and pulls down her skirt. We soon realise that Colette is going to break Antoine’s heart. Léaud and Pisier were born in the same month and were both 18 when they appeared in the film. Pisier was discovered by a casting director, who had been instructed by Truffaut that: “Jean-Pierre Léaud’s partner must be a real young girl, not a Lolita, not a biker type, nor a little woman. She must be fresh and cheerful. Not too sexy.” Colette, who treats Antoine like a “buddy”, much to his frustration, runs into him again briefly in Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968) and, finally, in the last film of the series, L’Amour en Fuite (Love On the Run, 1979), which she co-wrote. By then Colette was a lawyer, divorced like Antoine, but far more emotionally mature. The film contained what Truffaut called “real flashbacks”, when we see the differences between Pisier in her screen debut and Pisier 17 years and more than 20 films later, when she was midway through a prestigious career. She worked with such auteurs as Luis Buñuel, Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz, appearing in quality French mainstream movies, with a short and unhappy detour to Hollywood. Pisier was born in French Indochina, now Vietnam, where her father served as colonial governor. She moved to Paris with her family when she was 12. While starting out in films, she completed degrees in jurisprudence and political science at Paris University. After she had appeared in several mediocre genre films, including thrillers directed by the actor Robert Hossein, Pisier’s career took a more interesting turn. In 1974, she appeared in the most outrageous and amusing sequence in Buñuel’s penultimate film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté (The Phantom of Liberty), where she is among the elegant guests seated on individual lavatories around a table from which they excuse themselves to go and eat in a little room behind a locked door. In the same year, in Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating), Rivette’s brilliantly allusive comic meditation on the nature of fiction, she and Bulle Ogier act out, in a stylised and exquisite manner, a creaky melodrama in a mysterious house. Pisier was cast by the director André Téchiné in several of his early films, including Barocco (1976), for which she won a César award for her supporting role as a prostitute with a baby in tow. She later played Charlotte Brontë, alongside Isabelle Adjani (as Emily) and Isabelle Huppert (as Anne) in Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (1979). Her performance as a frivolous, neurotic wife in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s Cousin Cousine (1975), a hit in the US, led to her starring role in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), a Hollywood soap opera in which she almost overcame the cliches as a naive French girl who, betrayed by an American pilot, begins to use men for their money and power. But subsequently, apart from French Postcards (1979), in which, according to the critic Roger Ebert, “Marie-France Pisier, her jet-black hair framing her startling red lipstick, is the kind of dark Gallic woman-of-a-certain-age who knocks your socks off”, she was little seen in English-language movies. Among the rare exceptions was Chanel Solitaire (1981), in which she portrayed the designer Coco Chanel with her usual elegance. She made a splendid Madame Verdurin in Ruiz’s Proust adaptation, Le Temps Retrouvé (Time Regained, 1999), and was ethereal in the same director’s magical Combat d’Amour en Songe (2000). More recently, she was an iconic presence in Christophe Honoré’s homage to the French new wave, Dans Paris (2006). Pisier also directed two films, Le Bal du Gouverneur (The Governor’s Party, 1990), starring Kristin Scott Thomas and adapted from Pisier’s own novel about some of her childhood spent in New Caledonia in the Pacific, and Comme un Avion (Like an Airplane, 2002), a family drama based on the death of her own parents. Pisier was an outspoken defender of women’s rights and legal abortion. She overcame breast cancer in the 1990s. Her first husband was the lawyer Georges Kiejman, with whom she had a son. She is survived by her second husband, Thierry Funck-Brentano, a businessman; her brother, Gilles; and her sister, Evelyne. • Marie-France Pisier, actor, writer, director, born 10 May 1944; died 24 April 2011 France Europe Ronald Bergan guardian.co.uk
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Could 2011 be the year the music world embraces the chunky sax solos and terrifying troll noises of Planningtorock? It’s 2007 and Janine Rostron is performing in the unlikely venue of the lobby of the British Library in London. A one-woman project known as Planningtorock , she zig-zags across stage in a pair of giant trainers and a retina-frying shirt, half-rapping, half-wailing a song called Bolton Wanderer in which she describes her journey from her childhood home in the north of England to Berlin. The crowd, hovering on spiral staircases and propped between wall art, seem as confused as they are exhilarated. Four years on, she remains confusing and exhilarating. After a bold and buoyant debut album, 2006′s Have It All , last year she collaborated with Swedish art-pop duo the Knife on Tomorrow, In a Year , an opera about the life of Charles Darwin. A populist she is not. But with her new album W (on which she plays almost every instrument), Rostron could be about to break through to a wider audience. If Fever Ray’s icy brilliance tops critics’ polls , and the music world can take the warped goth of Zola Jesus to its
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‘A painting costs less than a sports car. And if it makes you feel something, then the expense is worth it’ What got you started? I grew up in an area of Munich that was full of artists and architects. My father was an artist; my uncle was an architect; my best friend’s father was an art dealer. I never considered doing anything else. What was your big breakthrough? Being part of a show called New Photography at MoMA in New York in 1996 . It put me on the map. You’re based between Berlin and Los Angeles. Which city do you find most
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Chrystia Freeland has called the US prison system an “American Gulag Archipelago.”
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The best works auctioned at east London’s Drawing Room, by Turner prizewinners and younger artists alike, are self-regarding, silly, and muse on the nature of drawing itself Every two years the Drawing Room in east London holds a fundraising exhibition, sending artists a sheet of A4 paper and inviting them to return it with an original drawing. Anyone can bid at the silent auction on 18 May for works by Turner prize contenders and winners, younger artists and well-known names such as Tacita Dean, Richard Long, Grayson Perry and Paula Rego, all with a starting price of £250. A not-for-profit gallery focusing on drawing and housed in a canalside studio block in Hackney, the Drawing Room is a good thing. The Biennial Fundraiser is democratically arranged, with more than 200 drawings hung up in plastic sleeves three-deep, and there is always a lot of humour. Mark Wallinger has supplied a self-portrait reduced to nothing but his pair of spectacles, which are as distinctive as Eric Morecambe’s. Michael Landy’s self-portrait is a cartoon of a council rubbish bin. Gavin Turk has just written his signature with a bit of charcoal stuck on the end of a long stick, emulating Henri Matisse, who drew in similar fashion on the ceiling when bed-ridden in the last years of his life. There is a lot of writing-as-drawing. Goshka Macuga’s just says Transubstantiation, while Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill) has copied out his raging manifesto against the arts cuts. Is a photograph of a bird’s nest a drawing? You wonder whether nests are drawings anyway. Maybe they’re sculpture. Tania Kovats, who supplied the photograph, recently wrote a book about drawing, so maybe she knows. Heather Deedman has copied the cover of Adrian Hill’s What Shall We Draw, a 1960s TV spin-off teach-yourself book, and Fiona Banner has painstakingly copied the worn, plain cover of Life Drawing by George B Bridgman. There is a lot of interesting anxiety about what drawing is or isn’t. The good stuff really declares itself among the dots and scribbles, the self-regarding and the silly. Here’s a drawing of a yellow duster, there’s some mad calligraphic nonsense produced under hypnosis by Matt Mullican. All works can be bid for online. I covet Angela de la Cruz’s sketch of a figure in a pile of boxes, and a hermaphroditic photo-collage by John Stezaker. But I might change my mind on the night. Until 18 May, Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London E2 Paula Rego Grayson Perry Tacita Dean Art London Adrian Searle guardian.co.uk
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Novelist threatens to abandon the sex-near-horses genre to write a proper book Jilly Cooper says she now finds it “difficult” to write sex scenes , even though she used to bash them out with the joyous snuffling of a Laura-Ashley-yellow Labrador finding a chocolate button under a sofa. In fact, Cooper may abandon the sex-near-horses genre entirely, and try to impersonate Margaret Drabble instead. “I’d like to write a good book, a proper good book,” she says, being entirely ignorant of my opinion that her murder-mystery Score! is a masterpiece. What is this? How can a woman who once compared an orgasm to the machinations of a washing machine abandon us to the sexless wastelands of more literary writers, when the experience of reading them is like watching Ian McEwan doing a handstand? Could the memory of a passage from Riders , Cooper’s other masterpiece, remind her of what she has lost and what may come again? This scene features the psychotic show-jumper Rupert Campbell-Black, who is based on Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, copulating with Amanda Hamilton, the wife of the foreign secretary. So, if you are very literal, you are about to imagine Andrew Parker Bowles and Ffion Hague in bed. “Fascinated, she watched his long fingers stroking her belly, then sliding into the dark bush . . . ” I have to cut the sentence, because there will be complaints from readers who think that sex is evil, particularly when it involves fictional characters who vote Conservative. But this next bit should be OK. “Now he was lifting her right leg, holding back the inside of her thigh . . . it was like an express train going into a tunnel.” Why does this scene work? Rupert may be a wife-beating anti-intellectual with Boarding School Syndrome, but in what posh women call bed it is all about making a woman feel like a washing machine. Rupert has the shell of an alpha male but the heart of a subscriber to the Save the Badger campaign. Another element is the inclusion of a simile that people who live in the middle-class badlands can relate to, in this case a train. A train that works. This is the key to the psychology of Cooper’s sex scenes, as she strokes the British love of pornography that features plumbers, electricians and purveyors of utilities generally, while soothing our snobbery by giving the lovers acreage and pig farms. This is your formula, Mrs Cooper. Long may you write. Jilly Cooper Tanya Gold guardian.co.uk
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From outraging Wagner purists to snubbing Hollywood, Patrice Chéreau is forever going against the grain. Now the great French director has turned his sights on British theatre. Patrice Chéreau , the great French theatre, opera and film director, is in London to rehearse the first play he has ever directed in the UK. It’s a coup for the Young Vic, and its artistic director, David Lan , tells me people are hanging about near the rehearsal rooms just to feel the presence, touch the hem. I am not ashamed to admit I am one of those hem-touchers, fascinated to meet the man who changed the face of modern opera with his centenary Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976, when he infuriated traditionalists by replacing Wagnerian horns and bearskins with the trappings of 19th-century plutocracy. That Ring made the then 31-year-old Chéreau’s career. It remains the achievement with which he is most often linked, except perhaps by movie buffs who admire the films that have
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