Her face and her silhouette inhabit the memory of the cinema, and the characters she has interpreted punctuate one of the richest filmographies. The red queen in Donkey Skin by Jacques Demy, Aunt Maryse in Venus Beauty by Tonie Marshall, the mother of Stanislas (Alain Chabat) in Pet, by Merzak Allouache … are all performed by the same actress, Micheline Presle. Dean of French actresses, she celebrates this Friday, August 22, 2022 her hundred years. Cinema legend, she crossed the century.
Micheline Chassagne, her real name, was born on August 22, 1922 in Paris. She begins the exercise of her profession by figuration in films Spanking by Pierre Carron (1937) and I sing by Christian Stengel (1938), with Charles Trenet. A year later, his career gained momentum thanks to his meeting with a monument of German cinema, the director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who offered him one of the leading roles in his feature film Girls in distress. She plays Jacqueline Presle, a young woman placed in boarding school and who will do everything to reconcile her divorcing parents. Seduced by the surname of this first major role, Micheline Chassagne will adopt it from now on.
She never stops spinning. It is directed by great directors such as the avant-garde Abel Gance and Marcel L’Herbier. In 1945, she burst the screen in Frillsby Jacques Becker, brilliant immersion in a haute-couture house and work very dear to the creator Jean-Paul Gaultier (his discovery of the film, at 13, will influence his vocation).
She continues her career with significant female roles. She thus interprets a prostitute in Tallow Ball, adaptation by Christian-Jaque of the eponymous short story by Maupassant. In 1947, in The Devil in the Body, by Claude-Autant Lara, she is a nurse’s aide, wife of a soldier who went to the front during the First World War, and who takes as a lover a 17-year-old teenager who has not been mobilized. His interpreter? A certain Gérard Philipe, who is not yet the star that we know and that she chooses herself. Rare freedom for the time.
On the strength of her success, she settled for a time in the United States, where she notably toured with Fritz Lang, another sacred monster of German cinema. It was there that she met the American director and producer William Marshall with whom she began a romantic relationship. They married in 1950, divorced four years later. From their union is born a daughter, Tonie Marshall, future director Caesarized in 2000 for the film venus beauty.
When she returned to France in the mid-1950s, after mixed success in the United States, she continued to tour under the direction of the greatest, from Sacha Guitry to Joseph Losey. In 1960, with Jean Gabin, she played a successful comedy, and with tasty dialogue, The baron of the lockdirected by Jean Delannoy.
Renowned for her insatiable curiosity and her great open-mindedness, she then worked with directors as different as Edouard Molinaro, Phillipe de Broca, directors of mainstream films, Elio Petri, a figure in Italian cinema for whom she shot The murderer in 1961 with Marcello Mastroianni, or Jacques Rivette, representative of the New Wave and author of more confidential films. With him, she plays in The nun, in 1966, with Anna Karina. In an article that pays tribute to his career, the daily Le Figaro reveals that François Truffaut, another emblematic filmmaker of the New Wave, said of her that she was “the best actress in the world”.
Parallel to the cinema, his career on the small screen, with his character in the television series The holy darlings (1965-1971), establishes its popular success in the hearts of the French.
Until 2014, the year of her last film to date, she practically did not stop filming. Collaborating with young directors, like Jean-Michel Ribes in his early days, does not scare him. She toured, among others, under the direction of Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais in the 80s, Patrice Chesnais, Jean-Pierre Mocky and even Francis Huster in the 2000s. A clever mix of audacity, mastery and understanding of the spirit of the times seems to inhabit his choice of films. In 2004, an honorary César saluted his entire career, exceptional in terms of time and number of films shot.
Micheline Presle has finally always played in the films of her daughter Tonie Marshall, who died in 2020 from lung cancer. The last film in which Micheline Presle appears, Do you want it or notin 2014, was also directed by her.