Screen and stage were not equal suitors for the affections of the French actor Geneviève Page, who once described working in cinema as a case of coitus interruptus. “You start a scene, you rehearse it, you’re ready. Then they do the sound and lighting. There comes a moment when you’ve got to charge in. And then: ‘Cut!’ It annoyed me each time,” Page told France Culture in 2009. “Whereas when you arrive in your theatre dressing room in the evening, you know it’ll start soon and you’ll see it through right to the end.”
Page, who has died aged 97, built a heavyweight theatre portfolio over more than five decades; she played roles such as Hermione in Euripides’s Andromache, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and the Fassbinder heroine Petra von Kant. But her film career had a stuttering rhythm, with the French industry never truly finding a place for her. Her melodramatic ardour and throaty timbre were not a natural fit in demure starlet roles; with her long neck and upwardly canted nose, her beauty had a certain haughtiness.
Starting with the 1956 film noir Foreign Intrigue, opposite Robert Mitchum, Page instead found better deployment abroad in a series of beguiling impact roles: most notably as a princess offering a safe haven in the 1961 epic El Cid; the high-class brothel madam who gives Catherine Deneuve her soubriquet, Belle de Jour, in Luis Buñuel’s 1967 masterpiece; and a German Mata Hari in Billy Wilder’s revisionist detective story The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).
But she showed her true allegiance in the week in the late 1950s when she both signed a lucrative three-picture deal in Hollywood and joined France’s prestigious Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), then under the stewardship of Jean Vilar, creator of the Avignon theatre festival. For Page, the latter was the big coup. “I was proud as a peacock. I was under the impression I’d won the biggest medal possible,” Page told France Culture. “Not in terms of being an actress, but in terms of being a person. It was their ethic and way of doing things: committing to the deepest level.”
She was born in Paris, the second child of Jacques Bonjean, an art collector and gallerist, and his wife, Germaine (nee Lipman), a member of the family of Jewish watchmakers who founded the Lip brand. Geneviève and her older brother, Michel, grew up in this bourgeois-aesthete milieu with a young Christian Dior – with whom her father had founded his gallery – as her godfather.
She was a bookworm whose imaginative tendencies brought her closer to her father, who was also a poet. “I was constantly grabbing people to say: ‘Look! Look at what I’ve just read!’” she recalled. “And after a while, they’d say: ‘Very nice, Geneviève. Now go back to your room.’ Except for my father. So, from the moment he started taking an interest in me, that made life smoother.”
After making her film debut in the 1950 Franco-German portmanteau film Ce Siècle à Cinquante Ans, Page’s first role of note was as the Marquise de Pompadour in the 1952 swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe. Simultaneously, she took theatre lessons with the method-influenced Russian actor Tania Balachova and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique in Paris. This led to initial roles with the Comédie-Française, before – thanks to an introduction from her Fanfan co-star Gérard Philipe – she joined the TNP.
Her father vetoed her going to Rome to film I Vitelloni for Federico Fellini, who could offer no script to reassure them about what she would perform. But Page made disconcerting choices of her own, picking out the role of a casino dancer paid to escort a bus driver who deems himself too ugly to be loved in The Strange Desire of Mr Bard (1954).
In 1959 she married the businessman and future Club Med managing director Jean-Claude Bujard; they subsequently had two children, Thomas and Adélaïde.
Casting around intrepidly for roles in the 60s, she also shot with the directors George Cukor (on the 1960 Liszt biopic Song Without End), John Frankenheimer (the Formula One drama Grand Prix, 1966) and Terence Young (the 1968 period tragedy Mayerling).
Page auditioned for the surrealist Buñuel shortly after an accident in her Jaguar E-type; he was captivated by her bruised features and cast her as the stringent Madame Anaïs in Belle de Jour. Page was called upon to briefly kiss Deneuve on the lips, and the director asked her to do it without warning. “I told him that if she slapped me, I’d give her one back,” Page later told Le Point. Bertrand Blier’s Buffet Froid, in 1979, also exploited this sexually forbidding aura with her role as a nymphomaniac widow.
All the while, Page continued her love affair with the stage. Playing Petra Kant for the Théâtre National de Chaillot earned her the French critics’ union award for best actress in 1980; in 1997, she won the Prix Plaisir for her role as a monstrous grand dame of the theatre in Jean Anouilh’s Colombe. Her final stage appearance was in 2011, playing the Roman empress Agrippina in Racine’s 1669 play Britannicus. “A bit wild, a bit daring, a bit nasty when needed,” was how Page summed up the majority of her stage roles. “My dream since I was 25 or 30 was to play a wife, not particularly distinguished, in front of a sink with her children. Something more quotidian. But no one ever offered me that.”
Her husband died in 2011. She is survived by Thomas and Adélaïde, and five grandchildren Adélie, Zoé, Balthazar, Géo and Nestor.
• Geneviève Page, actor, born 13 December 1927; died 14 February 2025
