Morgan, Michèle (1920—)

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Morgan, Michèle (1920—)

French film actress. Name variations: Michele Morgan. Born Simone Roussel on February 29, 1920, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France; married William Marshall (an American actor), in 1942 (divorced 1949); married Henri Vidal (a French actor), in 1950 (died 1959); children: (first marriage) one son, Michael.

Studied drama and dance as a child; began appearing in small film roles (1935); by outbreak of World War II, was among the most popular screen personalities in France (1939); spent much of the war in Hollywood, making several films with American directors which were generally mediocre (1939–45); returned triumphantly to the French screen (1946), winning the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival that year for her work in La Symphonie Pastorale; maintained an active international screen career (1940s–1970s); was named a Chevalier of the French Legion Of Honor (1969); accepted mostly small roles and cameo appearances, as well as occasional television and stage work (1980s–1990s).

Selected filmography:

Mademoiselle Mozart (1935); Le Mioche (1936); Gribouille (1937); Orage (1938); Quai des Brumes (1938); L'Entrâineuse (1939); Les Musiciens du Ciel (1940); Remorques (1941); La Loi du Nord (1942); Joan of Arc (U.S., 1942); Untel Père et Fils (1943); Two Tickets to London (U.S., 1943); Higher and Higher (U.S., 1943); Passage to Marseilles (U.S., 1944); The Chase (U.S., 1946); La Symphonie Pastorale (1946); The Fallen Idol (U.K., 1948); Fabiola (It., 1948); Aux Yeux du Souvenir (1949); La Belle que voilà (1950); The Naked Heart (U.K.-Fr., 1950); Le Château de Verre (1950); L'Etrange Madame X (1951); La Minute de Vérité (1952); Destinées (1953); Les Orgueilleux (1953); Obsession (1954); Napoléon (1955); Oasis (1955); Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955); Marguerite de la Nuit (1956); Marie-Antoinette (1956); Retour de Manivelle (1957); The Vintage (U.S., 1957); Le Miroir a Deux Faces (1958); Maxime (1958); Racconti d'Estate (It.-Fr., 1958); Menschen im Hotel (Ger.-Fr., 1959); Le Scélérats (1960); Le Puits aux Trois Vérités (1961); Le Crime ne paie pas (1962); Landru (1963); Constance aux Enfers (1964); Lost Command (U.S., 1964); Benjamin (U.S., 1966); Le Chat et le Souris (1975); Robert et Robert (1978); Un Homme et une Femme: Vingt Ans déja (1986); Tutti stanno benne (It.-Fr., 1990).

Late in 1940, Michèle Morgan stepped before the camera on a Hollywood sound stage to screen test for Alfred Hitchcock's upcoming production, Suspicion. She had been suggested as the film's leading lady to play opposite Cary Grant, even though she had arrived in California only a few months before from France where, at age 20, she had already created a sensation on the screen. Hitchcock sat politely through the audition but announced a few days later that he had decided to cast Joan Fontaine in the role, commenting that while the young French woman was certainly beautiful, her accent was much too thick. The great director's reaction typified Hollywood's indifferent response to Morgan. Although she would become France's most acclaimed actress after the war, she remains mostly unknown outside of Europe and still refers to her time in Hollywood as one of "shadows and light, rich in disillusionment."

Illusions had been Morgan's daily bread as a young girl, for she was sure she would grow up to be a film actress. In later years, she loved to tell the story of her father's excited return from work one evening to report that an astrologically talented fellow worker had cast his daughter's horoscope and predicted she would be famous. She had been only three years old at the time, having been born Simone Roussel on February 29, 1920, in the comfortably middle-class Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, the first of four children of Louis and Georgette Roussel . Louis, a manager at a Paris parfumerie, indulgently laughed at his daughter's fascination with movie magazines and their gossip while Georgette saw to it that she received dancing and gymnastic lessons. Everyone agreed the child was uncommonly beautiful. When Morgan was ten, the parfumerie closed, and Louis moved his family to coastal Dieppe, in northern France, where he had relatives and found work in a family-owned épicerie (grocery shop). By this time, Morgan had announced that she wanted to be an actress. Four years later, she stepped onto a stage for the first time with a local ballet troupe at the Casino Dieppe and won second prize in a contest to find Dieppe's most photogenic young lady. As if to confirm her future plans, the photographer who took her picture offered Morgan a trip back to Paris with him and an introduction to a producer friend. Louis balked at the idea of his 14-year-old daughter traveling alone with an older man, even when he was assured the photographer was happily married with two children. Georgette was more optimistic. Mother and daughter finally convinced Louis when Morgan suggested that her younger brother Paul come along as a chaperon. In the fall of 1934, Michèle's childhood illusions began to take shape.

Not long after she started formally studying dramatic technique with a private tutor, her benefactor began to offer her introductions to director friends, all of whom were struck by Morgan's almost otherworldly beauty and serene, open expression. By November 1935, the 15-year-old was writing excitedly home to a friend in Dieppe, "I've worked four days so far, that's not so bad! Just this morning I got a letter inviting me to the premier of a film with Loretta Young . It must be because [Young] is to be my model, and I must watch her well." Her work at this point was merely as an

extra, and her scenes as such in her first film, Mayerling, were cut from the final version. She fared only slightly better in La Vie Parisienne; only a discerning viewer will be able to spot her in the crowd scenes. Morgan's first screen role of more than a few seconds, and still a silent one, came in Yvan Noé's Madamoiselle Mozart, in which she appears in a brief scene with Danielle Darrieux . (The careers of the two young actresses would parallel each other. In later years, one film historian would write, "If Darrieux is the fantasy, Michèle Morgan is the mystery.") By this time, she reported to her Dieppe girlfriend that she had changed her name to Michèle Morgan, a director picking the last name while she came up with the first. "All my friends have taken a first name more sophisticated than Simone," she explained. "'Michèle' sounds fine and looks okay, so I have adopted it for all my new friends and fellow workers." The newly born Michèle finally spoke her first words on screen, in one line of dialogue, in Le Mioche (The Brat) in 1936. During the shoot, Morgan befriended the film's "script girl," who was a good friend of director Marc Allégret. Allégret was soon hearing about the "delightful, graceful ingenue" working on Le Mioche.

Everyone was used to seeing trembling little women with babies. To see a woman … wearing a trench coat and a beret, that was new!
—Michèle Morgan

"I just have to tell you some news that will give you … a great deal of pleasure!," Morgan wrote home to Dieppe. "I'm hired to be … in Marc Allégret's Gribouille! I don't know if you can imagine it, but I'm a little giddy myself!" Allégret, one of the most respected film directors in prewar France, had signed her to her first contract and given her the starring role in Gribouille opposite Raimu, a much-admired leading man of the day. Allégret had hired her after a screen test using a courtroom scene in which the film's Natalie, accused of murdering her lover, learns she has been acquitted by the jury. Released in 1939, Gribouille made Morgan a star; audiences were fascinated not only with her acting but with her trademark trench coat, beret and dangling cigarette. "Without [Natalie]," Morgan noted, "I would not have learned about myself as an actress. This story seemed to have been written by me, for me. A curious double personality began to work in me." This "double personality" produced a carefully studied, sensitive performance that was wholly new to French cinema before the war.

Allégret was so pleased with her work that he cast her in his next film, 1938's Orage (The Storm), in which Morgan played the lover of a married man who finally decides to return to his wife—the first of several intelligently played "other women" roles, in which momentary happiness only leads to disaster. At the end of Orage, Morgan's character kills herself; in her next film L'Entrâineuse (The Trainer, 1939), she is sent to prison; and in Les Musiciens du ciel (Heaven's Musicians, 1940), she dies a martyr's death for her devotion and loyalty to her lover.

Orage was the first of her films to be released in the United States, leading The New York Times' reviewer Frank Nugent to note: "Miss Morgan, a piquant newcomer, presents the other woman with charming naturalness." Praise was equally strong on both sides of the Atlantic for Morgan's work in Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938), in which she played opposite the great French actor Jean Gabin for the first time. Director Marcel Carné's story of underworld skullduggery on the docks of Marseilles featured Morgan as a gangster's mistress, in yet another lovers' triangle which ends in destruction. French film critic Jacques Siclier felt that the screen chemistry between Morgan and Gabin "seems to embody the very history of our cinema." The film portrayed the dark mood of a country poised for war so effectively that the Nazis, who took control of Paris just after the film's release, banned it as morally corrupt. Morgan found herself in the south of France when the Germans invaded the north in 1940, having traveled to Cannes with Allégret for a planned film which never materialized. Meanwhile RKO, on the strength of her performances to date, had offered Morgan a Hollywood contract and a ticket out of the chaos of wartime Europe. She decided to accept, interrupting a brilliant career in France for what would be a mediocre one in America.

Hollywood was never quite sure what to do with Morgan's exotic beauty and subtle acting, and film historians have commented that she seemed to become invisible in a series of roles far beneath her talents. Among her first experiences on arriving in Hollywood was the audition for Hitchcock. Stung by the rejection after such success in France, she turned down the role of Ilsa in Michael Curtiz' classic Casablanca, leaving the part to be famously played by Ingrid Bergman . In her first American picture, 1942's Joan of Paris, Morgan was inevitably cast as a French Resistance fighter who helps Allied pilots escape German prison camps. The film was largely ignored, and even Michèle would later say she disliked her work in the picture. As usual, Morgan's character dies at the end of the film, the same fate awaiting her in Two Tickets to London (1943), another wartime melodrama. Higher and Higher (1943) had no such lofty theme; a vapid musical, it starred a young Frank Sinatra as a man about town who turns a maid (Morgan) into a debutante. The film is remarkable only in that Michèle uncharacteristically danced and sang for her leading man instead of dying for him. Critic Bosley Crowther's aside in The New York Times that Morgan was "a lovely and talented chick" was entirely in keeping with the overall tone of the film. Crowther was more severe in his review of 1944's Passage to Marseilles, another war picture in which she played Humphrey Bogart's long-suffering wife. Crowther dismissed her work as "pitifully silly."

While shooting Higher and Higher in late 1942, Morgan took advantage of a break and hurried to a nearby phone booth to make a call. It was occupied, she later reported, by a "great blond devil" of a man who carelessly left a revolver behind as he hurried away. The gun was a prop, and the "great blond devil" was actor William Marshall, who returned to the telephone booth to claim his property and ask Morgan for a date. The two were married in November of 1942. A son Michael was born two years later.

In 1945, with the war at an end, Morgan returned to France to shoot her first European picture in five years. It would prove to be the film for which she is chiefly remembered, and the one in which she recaptured her former screen stature. Jean Delannoy's La Symphonie Pastorale (1946), adapted by Andrè Gide from one of his own stories, told of a blind woman who is taken in by a minister's family, only to have both father and son fall in love with her with tragic results. Although the love triangle was certainly not new to her repertoire, Morgan's sensitive portrayal of the woman captured the attention of audiences throughout Europe. The reaction was equally positive in America, where Crowther's previous dismissals of Morgan's work now turned to praise. "Miss Morgan's performance," he wrote, "is an exquisite piece of art—tender, proud, and piteous in its comprehensions of the feelings of the blind." For her work in La Symphonie Pastorale, Morgan won the Best Actress award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

Now at the peak of her career after her Hollywood limbo, Morgan began turning from roles as the desirable young heroine to the more mature love interest. In a British production, The Fallen Idol (1948), she played the mistress for whom Ralph Richardson commits murder, and in The Naked Heart (1949), she was reunited with director Marc Allégret in a story of a woman sheltered for most of her life in a convent school who is pursued by three potential lovers. As she rarely returned to the United States because of her work schedule in Europe, Morgan's marriage to Marshall began to deteriorate. Both took other actors as lovers—Morgan beginning a relationship with Henri Vidal, with whom she would appear in 1951's Italian costume drama, Fabiola. The marriage finally ended in divorce in May 1949, with Marshall retaining custody of young Michael. In January 1950, Morgan and Vidal were married in Paris.

From the time of her marriage to Vidal to his early death from kidney disease in 1959, Morgan would rarely be absent from the screen. She averaged one film a year, the most successful of this period being 1956's Les Grande Manoevres, directed by the venerable René Clair and featuring among its cast a young Brigitte Bardot . The pace slowed after Vidal's death, with a series of indifferent crime and action melodramas during the 1960s. The one exception was 1964's accomplished war drama Lost Command, in which Morgan was among an all-star international cast which included Anthony Quinn and George Segal.

By now the French New Wave was capturing the cinema world's attention. To many of the brash young directors of the New Wave, like Louis Malle and François Truffaut, Morgan belonged to an earlier film tradition, and one they were intent on subverting. Starting in the late 1960s, Morgan found good parts more elusive and turned her attention to other activities. She served as president of the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, was a member of the board of directors of France's government-owned television channel, FR3, and began accepting television work (her series Le Tiroir Secret, about a psychologist investigating her dead husband's past, was a huge success). In 1975, Morgan was made an officer of France's National Order of Merit, one of the country's highest civilian awards. She began accepting stage roles, too, notably in 1982's Cherie, which ran for 246 performances in Paris. In 1990, at age 70, Morgan turned in an exquisitely funny performance in the Italian-French comedy Tutti stanno benne (Everybody's Fine).

During her early career of the 1930s, Morgan's vulnerable heroines were sometimes seen as symbols of prewar Europe, destined for tragedy; while in the 1950s, as one of her country's most admired actresses, she was seen as representative of sophisticated French culture, a survivor of the war's destruction. But for Michèle Morgan, the little girl whose dreams came true, work left little time for such theorizing. "One can't tell a story," she once wrote, "while one is still living it."