"after The Conformist I had a moment of crisis; I was asking myself: what can come after azure?...I did not have the slightest idea that an orange film could be born. We needed another kind of emotion...It was the case of Last Tango.[8]For Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci and Storaro took inspiration from Bacon's paintings by using "rich oranges, light and cool grays, icy whites, and occasional reds combine[d] with Bertolucci's own tasteful choices of soft browns, blond browns, and delicate whites with bluish and pink shadings.
"I'm still struggling for the image of women in film and I'm still working, not as much as I would like to because for a woman in her late forties, it's hard to find work. Not only in France. I had a chat with Angelica Huston last year. We spoke about the same problem, you know. I don't know where it comes from? The writers, the producers, or the directors. But I think it's a pity even for the public. We get a response to see a mature woman in film " -
Maria Schneider
The song "Maria" from the 2012 album Banga by Patti Smith was written in memory of Schneider.
Filmography
Films
| Film | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Film | English Translation/ Also Known As |
Role | Language |
| 1969 | Les Femmes | cameo appearance | French | |
| L'Arbre de Noël | The Christmas Tree | cameo appearance | French | |
| 1970 | Madly | French | ||
| 1971 | Les jambes en l'air | a.k.a: César Grandblaise | Sarah Grandblaise | French |
| 1972 | Hellé | Nicole | French | |
| La Vieille Fille | The Old Maid | Mome | French, German | |
| What a Flash! | cameo appearance | French | ||
| Ultimo tango a Parigi | Last Tango in Paris | Jeanne | French, English | |
| 1973 | Cari genitori | Dear Parents | Antonia | Italian, English |
| Reigen (de) | Dance Of Love | Das süße Mädel | German | |
| 1975 | La Baby Sitter | Scar Tissue | Michèle | English |
| Professione: reporter | The Passenger | The Girl | English, German, Spanish | |
| 1977 | Violanta | Laura | French | |
| 1978 | Voyage au jardin des morts | Hypolyte | French | |
| Io sono mia | I Belong To Me | Suna | Spanish | |
| 1979 | La Dérobade | Memoirs of a French Whore | Maloup | French |
| Een vrouw als Eva | A Woman Like Eve | Liliane | Dutch | |
| 1980 | Weiße Reise | White Travel | German | |
| Haine | Hate | French | ||
| Mama Dracula | Mother Dracula | Nancy Hawaii | French, English | |
| 1981 | Une saison de paix à Paris | a.k.a: Sezona mira u Parizu | Elen | French, Serbian |
| La chanson du mal aimé | French | |||
| Merry-Go-Round | Leo | English | ||
| 1982 | Cercasi Gesù | Looking For Jesus a.k.a: L'imposteur |
Francesca | Italian |
| Balles perdues | Stray Bullets | Véra | French | |
| 1984 | Princess & The Photographer | a.k.a: Yoroppa tokkyu | English, Japanese | |
| 1987 | Résidence surveillée | Céline Fontaine | French | |
| 1989 | Bunker Palace Hôtel | Muriel | ||
| 1991 | The Conviction | |||
| Écrans de sable | Sarah | French | ||
| 1992 | Au pays des Juliets | In the Country of Juliets | Raissa | |
| Les Nuits fauves | Savage Nights | Noria | French | |
| 1996 | Jane Eyre | Bertha | English | |
| 1998 | Something to Believe In | English | ||
| 2000 | Les Acteurs | The Actors | herself | French |
| 2002 | La Repentie | The Repentant | French | |
| 2004 | Au large de Bad Ragaz | |||
| 2006 | Perds pas la boule! | Thelda | French | |
| Quale amore | Italian | |||
| 2007 | La Vie d'artiste | The Life Of The Artist | cameo appearance | French |
| La Clef | The Key | Solange | French | |
| 2008 | Cliente | Client | Marie-Hélène | French |
TV Series
- 1984: Buio nella valle (TV mini-series)
- 1985: A Song for Europe (TV movie)
- 1987: Résidence surveillée
- 1987: L'or noir de Lornac (TV series)
- 1988: Silvia è sola (TV movie)
- 1993: Contrôle d'identité (TV movie)
- 1995: Navarro (TV series) (as Samira in one episode, L'ombre d'un père)
- 1998: Angelo nero (TV movie), 1998
- 1998: Il cuore e la spada (TV movie), (Queen Maga of Ireland)
- 2004: Maigret (TV series)
- 2008: A.D. La guerre de l'ombre (TV mini-series)
Maria Schneider RIP
LAST TANGO IN PARIS was the hottest film of 1972 this side of the XXX hits DEEP THROAT and BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR. Audiences were enthralled
by the full-frontal nude scenes between the cinema icon Marlon Brando
and the lithe ingenue Maria Schneider. The young actress was a protege
of Brigitte Bardot. Nothing in the script had forewarned the 20 year-old
about an improvised sex duet with Brando during which he greased her
naked flesh with butter in preparation for anal sex.The sex was faked
,
but Schneider’s tears were real, for in her words, “I felt humiliated
and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by
Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize.
Thankfully, there was just one take.”Her salary for the entire
film was $4000.No one paid Schneider for the everlasting infamy, for LAST TANGO IN PARIS enraged audiences around the world. New York critics labelled the film ‘pornography’. Protesters fought with movie-goers in New Jersey and church leaders descried the film the end of morality. The director and Brando were awarded Oscars for LAST TANGO, despite the controversy. Few people worried
about the effects of Bertolucci’s brutal treatment of his lead actress.Schneider struggled throughout the 70s with by drug addiction
,
overdoses, and a suicide attempt. She was lucky to have survived that
period and her career lasted into the 90s, although the Frenchwoman
never attained the acclaim of LAST TANGO IN PARIS. I saw the film at the
Orson Welles Theater. I fantasized about sex with Maria Schneider for
months, even after she declared herself as bisexual. Actually that
statement might have rekindled my interests, however our paths never
crossed in the following decades. I mourn her passing and hope that she
is at rest.Her beauty
will be another light in the stars.
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Brando also once told Elia Kazan, “Here I am a balding, middle-aged
failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act.” It isn’t that he didn’t
think he was good; it’s that he didn’t think being good at acting
amounted to much. As far as Brando was concerned, he was a genius at an
idiotic pursuit.He approached Hollywood—once he got around to
approaching it at all—as if it was “one big cash register,” as he told
an interviewer when he arrived in 1950 for his first film, The Men.
He wasn’t happy to be there, wasn’t grateful for the opportunity, and
didn’t try to hide it. “The only reason I’m here,” he famously said, “is
because I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.”
Brando wasn’t Bertolucci’s first choice for the role. The character—American in the finished film—was originally French, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon had all turned the role down. Brando’s name was brought up by the film’s producer, Alberto Grimaldi, who was then suing the actor for causing delays during the shooting of another of his films, director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 Burn!. Grimaldi offered to drop the suit if Brando would appear in Tango. Brando, who had walked off the set of Burn! to protest the treatment of Colombian extras and was likely to lose the case, agreed.
After signing up for Tango, Brando came to Paris, where he and Bertolucci holed up in an apartment and talked. The talking went on for weeks. Bertolucci laid himself bare, revealing childhood pains, private aspirations, personal secrets. Brando did the same. Brando, who had once broken a paparazzo’s jaw, had always been intensely private, but Bertolucci drew him out. Brando had been in psychotherapy since the 1950s and knew well where his soft spots were, the sources of his depression and instability, even if he never seemed to escape them: his mother was a binge drinker who regularly abandoned Brando and his sisters without warning for weeks at a time; his father was an alcoholic, bullying, emotionally abusive womanizer who quite thoroughly convinced Marlon he was worthless
As Brando and Bertolucci collaborated on the story, the character of Paul stopped being Bertolucci, and started being Brando. In his memoir, Brando writes plainly, “[Bertolucci] wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me.” Bertolucci, who spoke little English and had no grasp of American slang, let Brando write or improvise nearly all his lines. Unlike so many previous roles, the pain in Tango doesn’t just lurk around the edges of the performance. It is the performance
Early in the film, for example, he stands in the hotel bathroom where his wife killed herself and listens to a maid—busy scrubbing the blood from the tile—recount being questioned by the police about Paul’s background. She says she told them that:
“[Paul] became an actor, bongo player, revolutionary in South America, journalist in Japan, one day he lands in Tahiti, hangs around, learns French. Then he went to Paris. There he meets a woman with money and marries her. Since then, what has your boss done? Nothing.”
In most movies, this is exposition. But not here. Every item listed is a ghost of something from Brando’s life or career, from Tahiti, where he owned an island, to Paris, where he now finds himself. And the most telling point of all, the question at the end of it: What does it all add up to, this life he’s led? What has he accomplished? Nothing. All during the speech Brando stands mute, offering not a word of contradiction.
Near the end of shooting Tango, Brando learned that his thirteen-year-old son, Christian, had been kidnapped from his boarding school. It would turn out to be a plot by Brando’s unstable, alcoholic first wife, Anna Kashfi, to keep Brando from gaining custody. Brando hired private detectives, who found the boy under a pile of dirty laundry in a tent in the Mexican desert. It was a sensational incident that set the tone for decades of sensational incidents to follow, many involving his children, and violence or death: there were years of custody fights, lawsuits, divorces, and compulsive womanizing, and in 1990 Christian would shoot and kill the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne, in Marlon’s home. Marlon whisked Cheyenne, who’d been mentally unstable for years, out of the country to prevent her giving any damning testimony against Christian. He hired a cadre of celebrity lawyers to defend Christian. There were even charges that Marlon tampered with the crime scene. He avoided as long as he could giving his own eye-witness testimony. Christian would eventually be found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cheyenne was never the same after the shooting, and after several unsuccessful attempts, committed suicide in 1995. Brando, an absentee parent for so long, pursued his children at the end, just as Paul had pursued Jeanne, and in the end they all got away.
“When Last Tango in Paris was finished,” Brando wrote in his memoir, “I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore… In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before and simply [tried] to act the part in a technical way. The audience doesn’t know the difference.”article link
Brando wasn’t Bertolucci’s first choice for the role. The character—American in the finished film—was originally French, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon had all turned the role down. Brando’s name was brought up by the film’s producer, Alberto Grimaldi, who was then suing the actor for causing delays during the shooting of another of his films, director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 Burn!. Grimaldi offered to drop the suit if Brando would appear in Tango. Brando, who had walked off the set of Burn! to protest the treatment of Colombian extras and was likely to lose the case, agreed.
After signing up for Tango, Brando came to Paris, where he and Bertolucci holed up in an apartment and talked. The talking went on for weeks. Bertolucci laid himself bare, revealing childhood pains, private aspirations, personal secrets. Brando did the same. Brando, who had once broken a paparazzo’s jaw, had always been intensely private, but Bertolucci drew him out. Brando had been in psychotherapy since the 1950s and knew well where his soft spots were, the sources of his depression and instability, even if he never seemed to escape them: his mother was a binge drinker who regularly abandoned Brando and his sisters without warning for weeks at a time; his father was an alcoholic, bullying, emotionally abusive womanizer who quite thoroughly convinced Marlon he was worthless
As Brando and Bertolucci collaborated on the story, the character of Paul stopped being Bertolucci, and started being Brando. In his memoir, Brando writes plainly, “[Bertolucci] wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me.” Bertolucci, who spoke little English and had no grasp of American slang, let Brando write or improvise nearly all his lines. Unlike so many previous roles, the pain in Tango doesn’t just lurk around the edges of the performance. It is the performance
Early in the film, for example, he stands in the hotel bathroom where his wife killed herself and listens to a maid—busy scrubbing the blood from the tile—recount being questioned by the police about Paul’s background. She says she told them that:
“[Paul] became an actor, bongo player, revolutionary in South America, journalist in Japan, one day he lands in Tahiti, hangs around, learns French. Then he went to Paris. There he meets a woman with money and marries her. Since then, what has your boss done? Nothing.”
In most movies, this is exposition. But not here. Every item listed is a ghost of something from Brando’s life or career, from Tahiti, where he owned an island, to Paris, where he now finds himself. And the most telling point of all, the question at the end of it: What does it all add up to, this life he’s led? What has he accomplished? Nothing. All during the speech Brando stands mute, offering not a word of contradiction.
Near the end of shooting Tango, Brando learned that his thirteen-year-old son, Christian, had been kidnapped from his boarding school. It would turn out to be a plot by Brando’s unstable, alcoholic first wife, Anna Kashfi, to keep Brando from gaining custody. Brando hired private detectives, who found the boy under a pile of dirty laundry in a tent in the Mexican desert. It was a sensational incident that set the tone for decades of sensational incidents to follow, many involving his children, and violence or death: there were years of custody fights, lawsuits, divorces, and compulsive womanizing, and in 1990 Christian would shoot and kill the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne, in Marlon’s home. Marlon whisked Cheyenne, who’d been mentally unstable for years, out of the country to prevent her giving any damning testimony against Christian. He hired a cadre of celebrity lawyers to defend Christian. There were even charges that Marlon tampered with the crime scene. He avoided as long as he could giving his own eye-witness testimony. Christian would eventually be found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cheyenne was never the same after the shooting, and after several unsuccessful attempts, committed suicide in 1995. Brando, an absentee parent for so long, pursued his children at the end, just as Paul had pursued Jeanne, and in the end they all got away.
“When Last Tango in Paris was finished,” Brando wrote in his memoir, “I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore… In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before and simply [tried] to act the part in a technical way. The audience doesn’t know the difference.”article link
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