Runaway to runway
By Michael J. Roberts
"I have never had the opportunity to play sexy women. I must believe that my charm was not in my ass."
~ Michèle Morgan
Michèle Morgan was a fixture in French film for nearly four decades having started her acting career as a 17 yr. old, starring in 1937 in Gribouille by the director who discovered her, Marc Allégret. She studied acting at the Cour Simon drama school in Paris after leaving home at age 15 determined to be an actress. Bit parts in films as an extra helped her pay for her studies but Allégret had her essentially bypassing the pay-your-dues career stage. Having effectively started in the industry at the top she co-starred with Charles Boyer in her next film, Orage, also for Allégret before she appeared in one of the finest films of all time, Port of Shadows (Les Quai des Brumes) for A-list director Marcel Carné, opposite French legend Jean Gabin.. The era is defined in cinema history as Poetic Realism and the image of Michèle Morgan and Jean Gabin starring forlornly through a rainy window, him in his soldiers uniform and her in her raincoat and beret is one of the defining visuals of the age.
Morgan acquitted herself superbly against the more experienced and older actors she was inevitably compared to, and Gabin fell for her in real life but she rebuffed him claiming that she was too young for him. Top screenwriter Charles Spaak wrote her next film, L'Entraîneuse, for her and she was already confident enough to carry the weight of the film on her young shoulders. Gabin was her leading man again in the quite strange but very good Le Recif Corail, an odd tale of a sailor on the run set in Australia! This Australian knows that the writer and director got almost every local detail wrong (not that many French viewers would have twigged and not that it mattered) but it’s a lively piece and the chemistry between Morgan and Gabin is strong and the addition of the excellent Pierre Renoir as a kind of Javert to Gabin’s Valjean.
A co-star assignment with French icon Michel Simon, who she’d played against in Port of Shadows, was another success as was the superb Jean Grémillon directed, Remorques, with a wonderful Jacques Prévert script and sets by genius designer Alexandre Trauner. This time her co-star Jean Gabin and the young woman settled into a love affair that was serious for both, but the war intervened and they went their separate ways, ironically both of them landed separately in Hollywood. Two French films she’d had in the can were released while she was in America, one directed by Julien Duvivier (who also sat out the war in Hollywood), The Heart of a Nation didn’t hit screens until 1943.
Michèle Morgan, like Gabin, Duvivier and even Jean Renoir, had an uneven experience in the meatgrinder of the American film industry. Joan of Paris was her first US film, made for RKO where she starred with Paul Henreid, who was preferred to Gabin who was in the running as was Duvivier to direct but that went to English journeyman director Robert Stevenson. Two programmers followed, Two Tickets To London and Higher and Higher (Frank Sinatra’s feature debut) before she made the excellent war drama for Michael Curtiz, Passage To Marseille, opposite major star Humphrey Bogart. The vivid and propagandistic piece was aimed at cheering on the Free French prior to the Liberation of Paris in WWII. The film featured a superb supporting cast of Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Victor Francen with incredible photography by James Wong Howe and a trademark score from master composer Max Steiner.
The war ended and Morgan’s last Hollywood film from that period was a fine suspenser opposite Robert Cummings called The Chase, a Philip Yordan adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich story which did solid business. She left Hollywood and the house she built at Cielo Drive, that later became infamous because of Sharon Tate and the Manson Family and Jean Delannoy welcomed her home with one of her most celebrated parts, as a young blind girl in Pastoral Symphony. A trip across the channel saw her work with Ralph Richardson in Carol Reed’s brilliant The Fallen Idol and Delannoy backed up with To The Eyes of Memory, opposite new heartthrob Jean Marais (Jean Cocteau's boyfriend) in a script by Henri Jeanson. Henri Vidal became her husband and leading man in her next three films before René Clément directed here in The Glass Castle, again with Marais.
The 1950s proved to be the most productive and successful of Morgan’s illustrious career. Jean Grémillon and Marc Allégret both reappeared and directed her in The Strange Madame X and The Naked Heart respectively, the former with hubby Vidal. One of the defining characteristics of her career through this decade is the consistency with which she works with A-list directors and almost all of her output is in the hands of storied professionals – confirmation of the artistic standing in which she was held in by that elite cohort. Jean Delannoy provided a further four films (The Moment of Truth, Love, Soldiers and Women, Obsession, Marie Antoinette), Yves Allégret (The Proud and The Beautiful, Oasis) Claude Autant-Lara (Marguerite Of The Night), René Clair (The Grand Maneuver) – and incredible run with quality talent.
Michèle Morgan was now one of the biggest and most consistent stars in European cinema. She brought a serene beauty and steely resolve to her work which graced many a role of women in love or in peril or both. She made a series of Italian films in the late part of the decade, as well as a German one, even doing an American film set in France with Mel Ferrer. In 1960 Henri Decoin directed her and husband Vidal in Why Do You Come So Late – Vidal died of a heart attack at age 40 that same year. The actress continued to work during the era of the Nouvelle Vague but was associated heavily with the older cinema establishment and was not embraced by the new, hot directors. The one exception was Claude Chabrol, who tapped the actress for a part in his variation of the Bluebeard tale, Landru where Morgan held her own against the experienced Danielle Darrieux and talented newcomer Stéphane Audran.
Michèle Morgan made another dozen films in the 1960s of varying quality but as a woman in her forties and associated with something of a bygone era the times and the roles no longer suited her gentle charisma and graceful charms. She worked with great actors like Paul Meurisse and Jean-Louis Trintignant and even found a part in an Anthony Quinn war movie as an elegant countess. After a near 10 year break she made her last starring role in a feature in 1975 for Claude Lelouch, starring opposite Serge Reggiani in Cat and Mouse.
She will forever remain the gorgeous and lost Nelly in the immortal Port of Shadows but she proved that the tenacious 15 year old runaway had what it takes to carve a significant career as an actress based on more than her looks. In many roles across several decades she was the epitome of effortless elegance and serene beauty, but with a quiet strength and cool resolve to match. She lived to the ripe old age of 96 and died of natural causes in 2016.