The “success” led to the equally awful TV mini-series, Scruples, adapted from Judith Krantz, and a smaller part in French Postcards. The fatuity of the film was coolly observed by Pisier’s unflappable beauty-as if she was a wedding cake floating on a stream of detritus. This career had taken her to Hollywood where she starred in what was a considerable but notorious hit, The Other Side of Midnight (1977), taken from the Sidney Sheldon novel, made as a flagrant piece of trash and defying the barrage of bad reviews. She did three other films for Techine- French Provincial (1975) Barocco (1976) and The Bronte Sisters (1979), where she played Charlotte, Isabelle Adjani was Emily and Isabelle Huppert was Anne-with Patrick Magee as their father! In addition, she had won a supporting actress Cesar in Jean-Charles Tacchella’s hit, Cousin-Cousine (1975). The affair didn’t last too long, but the friendship was enough to keep Pisier in two sequels with Truffaut and Leaud- Stolen Kisses (1968) and Love on the Run (1979).īy then, Marie-France Pisier was close to being an international figure, with a run of unusual films: The novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet had cast her opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in his erotic thriller, Trans-Europ Express (1966) she had made her first film for Andre Techine, Pauline is Leaving (1969) and she was in Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberte (1974)-she was one of the dinner-party group sitting on toilets instead of chairs. Truffaut (29) left his wife and two daughters for her-he told a friend that Marie-France was “modern, very feminist, left-wing … very frank, direct, very strong and at the same time very childlike.” The director suspected that she meant grief for him and for his family-directors don’t always take as much credit as they deserve. Pisier was recommended, and she got the part in “Antoine and Colette,” one of five separate episodes. She must be simple and cheerful, and a have a good average culture. Jean-Pierre’s partner must be a real girl, not a Lolita, not a leather-jacket type, not a little young woman.
Five years later, she was a young actress who answered this advertisement in the film magazine Cinemonde: “Francois Truffaut seeks fiancée for Jean-Pierre Leaud and for Love at Twenty. In fact, she only came to live in France at the age of twelve. Though she had the look of a Parisian socialite, so much about her was unexpected: She was born in Dalat, in Indo-China, the daughter of a French colonial governor.
But she was made for drama, and even melodrama. In her brow and her gaze, serenity seemed on the point of becoming a mask. Marie-France Pisier had an immense, composed beauty, with a marble air of absolute assurance. She drowned in her own swimming pool in the south of France, aged 66.
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