Film actresses: 1 Françoise Fabian

Françoise Fabian in Ma nuit chez Maud (1969)

So let's begin this list of French actresses with the lady who gives this blog its name, or rather the lady who plays the lady: Françoise Fabian. Not a brilliant start, to be honest, as Mademoiselle Fabian has had a somewhat hit and miss film career. During the 1970s it's fair to say that she played procuresses rather more often than seems wise, most famously as the title character in the based-on-real-life sex romp (though not for her) Madame Claude. (A good deal later, in the mid-1980s, she played another madame in the much better Faubourg St Martin, by the oddly little-known director Jean-Claude Guiguet, one of the most rapturously romantic films I have ever seen.) Before the madame, the prostitute: ten years before Madame Claude she was one of Catherine Deneuve's working-girl colleagues in Belle de Jour – in fact, the one who has to take over when Deneuve doesn't know how to satisfy an overbearingly submissive client. Fabian performs her dominatrix role with her customary class – indeed, the USP of her film persona seems to be the combination of class and loose morals, and the success or failure of the role is often in the balance of these two opposing characteristics. She is the lead actress in a much-admired but long-invisible film called Raphaël ou le débauché, by that perennially underrated director Michel Deville, and from the few bits I have seen it seems to get the balance fantastically right; but of course the part for which she will surely be remembered, playing the classiest temptress you could imagine, is the title role in Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maud. Over many years this has gradually emerged as my favourite film, and though it rightly belongs to an unbelievably relaxed and charming Jean-Louis Trintignant (he refers to himself as 'sinister' at one point, which is a good précis of practically every role he's played, except this one), Fabian is his equal in the long 'my night' sequence, a white-nightshirted mirage of come-ons and rebuffs, of flattery and raillery, interrupted by her sad, captivating monologue about the death of her lover, and 'sale destin'. Pretty as Trintignant's 'blonde unique' Marie-Christine Barrault turns out to be, it seems almost incomprehensible that he would choose her over Fabian, and yet it also makes complete sense, given the self-imposed narrowness of his character's outlook. And then she reappears at the end of the film, and you wonder at his judgement again.
Fabian, who I believe has had a pretty good theatre career (as have so many actresses we know from French cinema), has gone on making her mark in what are basically character roles: I recall her nicely astringent performance in La Bûche, and more recently as the wife's irritable mother in Ozon's 5X2. But with the legacy of that one big role – reminiscent in its sense of untapped potential of the 'one-hit wonder' (and what a wonder) of Jane Greer in Out of the Past – Fabian sometimes seems like the one that got away. Like Maud herself?