Bernadette Lafont

Bernadette Lafont — Biography

Bernadette Lafont (born 28 October 1938 in Nîmes, Gard, France; died 25 July 2013 in Nîmes) was a French film and stage actress. Alongside acting she worked as a dancer, and in the later part of her career she also worked as a director and writer. Over a long career that ran from the late 1950s until her death she appeared in well over a hundred film and television productions, and she is regarded as one of the emblematic performers of the French New Wave.

Her first striking screen appearance came in 1957 in François Truffaut's short film Les Mistons. A year later she played Marie in Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958); this was followed by the 1960 production L'eau à la bouche and by Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), which she again made under Chabrol's direction. These early films made her one of the actors most sought after by the new generation of French directors.

Through the 1960s and 1970s she played a wide range of parts, from comedy to drama. Her roles in Nelly Kaplan's La Fiancée du pirate (1969) and Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain (1973) — a character named Marie in both — placed her among the most talked-about performers of her time. In the same years she also appeared in popular comedies, reaching a broad audience.

In the 1980s she took part in productions such as Cap Canaille (1983) and L'effrontée (1985), and her acting brought her a César Award. She was also honoured with France's leading distinctions: she was made a Knight and an Officer of the Légion d'honneur, an Officer of the National Order of Merit and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.

She kept working in the final period of her career; Gökten Bir Uydu Düştü and Attila Marcel, both released in Turkish cinemas, are among her late works. In her private life she married first Gérard Blain and then Diourka Medveczky; she had two daughters, Pauline and Élisabeth. She died on 25 July 2013 at the age of 74 in Nîmes, the city where she was born.