Maria Schneider is dead

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Maria Schneider is dead

Postby deselby » Thu Feb 03, 2011 7:31 pm

RIP, she was a fantasy figure for me. Two great movies, Last Tango in Paris and The Passenger. She played the same enigmatic crazy type in both.

Aged 58 - wow.

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Re: Maria Schneider is dead

Postby deselby » Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:51 pm

http://www.tcmuk.tv/blog.php?id=219

French actress Maria Schneider passed away at the weekend, after battling with cancer for some time.

She was only 19 when she shot to fame starring alongside Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s extraordinary, and troubling, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ in 1972.

The film was controversial with the censors, but popular with audiences, who flocked in their droves to see the graphically sexual relationship between Brando’s grieving middle-aged widower and Schneider’s 19 year old ingénue.

Born of a sexual fantasy from Bertolucci, the premise is, on the surface, a simple one, yet it is filled with highly destructive issues of possession, identity, disillusionment and betrayal.

The misogyny of the film carried over into the real world too. Brando had, by this point in his career, given up any pretence at trying to learn lines, and was sticking cue cards all around the set, whilst still being paid a small fortune for his appearance; whilst Schneider, being paid a mere $4,000, was too young to fully grasp the implications of what else he was planning.

It was Brando’s idea to introduce the infamous scene involving butter. It certainly wasn’t in the original script. Schneider was unsure about the whole thing, but she went along with it, despite her nervous reservations. Years later she would come to feel it ruined her life; something which is hard to argue with.

“I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script,” she said. “But at the time, I didn't know that. Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. 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 apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

But it wasn’t just Scheider who felt the film had been a mistake. It’s a little known fact that Brando was also deeply bothered by it. So much so, he didn’t speak to Bertolucci again for 15 years.

“I was too young to know better,” said Schneider. “Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt. People thought I was like the girl in the movie, but that wasn't me.”

Over the following years, as Schneider got older, the weight of the fame caused by that film became increasingly difficult to bear. After declaring herself bisexual, she became addicted to heroin and cocaine. She wouldn’t get clean until the 1980s - and then only after a failed suicide attempt.

But the damage had been done. She had become known for being difficult on set – and unreliable, which is possibly the most unforgivable sin for anyone in the film industry.

Possibly saddest of all is that ‘Last Tango in Paris’ tends to overshadow a vastly superior movie in Schneider's catalogue: one which costarred Jack Nicolson and was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Released in 1975, ‘The Passenger’ follows an aimless foreign correspondent (Nicolson) who takes on the identity of a fellow American traveler he finds dead in a hotel room in an African desert, only to discover that his new identity is a highly dangerous one.

Nicolson’s character follows the fate of his new identity to its understated conclusion, almost as though he were in a dream; and to an ending featuring one of the most extraordinarily complex shots in cinematic history; one which today could easily be CGI’d, but which back then had to be done manually (watch the film to see if you can spot it…)

Along the way Nicolson meets Schneider, who here gets to play a genuinely smart and pretty girl, with whom he begins a relationship that is the very antithesis of the one in ‘Last Tango’.

In ‘The Passenger’, Schneider is allowed to be more in control of what she is doing, rather than an object of male manipulation. It’s an altogether more satisfying film to watch, for all concerned. But it also suffers from being very European, and of its time, especially in its pacing. Modern audiences not keen on art-house cinema may well struggle to avoid being bored. If you like this kind of film however, it really is a hugely rewarding experience.

‘The Passenger’ is a far more fitting film for Schneider to be remembered for; much more so than the one which may have ruined her life, but which did indeed secure her a place in the pantheon of cinema, and for which she will never be forgotten, if for all the wrong reasons.
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Re: Maria Schneider is dead

Postby Rapier09 » Thu Feb 10, 2011 7:43 pm

If she is remembered then her career went quite far.
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