Actress Françoise Brion, face of the New Wave, died at the age of 92

Actress Françoise Brion, who was popular in cinema during the New Wave era, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 92, her children Diane and Simon Doniol-Valcroze announced on Tuesday.

Real name Françoise German de Ribon, the one who filmed for several leading directors without ever reaching stardom, was born on January 29, 1933 in Paris.

At the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Art where she studied in her youth, one of her friends, Jean-Paul Belmondo, advised her to change her name. “Drop the “de”, it sounds aristocratic,” he told her then, according to her story. It becomes Brion, the anagram of Ribon. The actress made her film debut at the end of the 1950s in “Nathalie” by Christian-Jaque, “Katia” by Robert Siodmak and “A Witness in the City” by Édouard Molinaroro.

Success since 1960

Before becoming her second husband, the actor and director Jacques Doniol-Valcroze asked her to star in her first feature film, “L’eau à la bouche”, released in 1960, which launched her career and helped to make the New Wave known. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze was one of the founders of the famous magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma, where all the greats of the New Wave, such as Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, wrote.

Françoise Brion, who first married actor Paul Guers, appeared in a total of forty films until the mid-1980s.

With “L’immortelle” by Alain Robbe-Grillet (Louis-Delluc Prize 1963), she played one of her most beautiful roles, that of a foreigner courted by a man through the streets of Istanbul.

Roles of intellectual bourgeois

With large brown eyes, abundant hair and bony cheekbones, she has several times embodied the intellectual bourgeoisie. “His career oscillated between fairly undressed roles and ambitious films for initiates,” wrote Jean Tulard in his Dictionary of Cinema. The actress knew how to make fun of the roles of “sphinx”, seductress or femme fatale which she played a lot.

It was on the stage – her father was a theater director – that she obtained the most satisfaction, moving from drama to comedy, from burlesque to tragedy.

She played in Avignon, in Parisian venues like the Atelier or the Colline, in plays by Françoise Sagan, Pirandello, Brecht or Pinter, directed by Jorge Lavelli, Georges Wilson, Robert Hossein and many others.

On television, Françoise Brion notably starred in the series “Les Brigades du Tigre” (1983) or “Les liaisons Dangereuses” by Josée Dayan in 2003.