actress Micheline Presle celebrates her 100th birthday

For a few days, the hashtag #1RosePourMicheline flourishes on social networks. In an online kitty, several admirers of actress Micheline Presle gathered €648 to offer her a bouquet of 100 roses. They want to honor the one who blows out 100 candles this Monday, August 22.

In almost eighty years of career (her last shoot dates from 2014), Micheline Presle will have had more than a hundred different faces. She is Félicie Nanteuil in the film of the same name, Micheline Lafaury in the famous Falbalas by Jacques Becker, or Mme de Moni in The nun by Jacques Rivette. «She is a transgenerational actress, capable of playing the disturbing woman, as in The Castle of the Cursed Lovers by Riccardo Freda, released in 1956, or pure fantasy in The King of Heartsdirected by Philippe de Broca in 1966, analyzes film historian Jean Ollé-Laprune. She blends into each role, which explains why we still pay tribute to her films today. »

From “Paradise Lost” to “Devil in the Body”

” The movie theateris without a doubt the most beautiful story of my life”, confides the actress, moved, in 2004, when she receives a César of honor. Like Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan, two other figures of the 7th art with whom she is often associated, Micheline Chassagne, her birth name, began her career very young, at 16 years old. It was alongside the “Crazy singer”, Charles Trenet, that she made her first appearance in front of the camera in 1938, in I sing by Christian Stengel. A year later, she played Jacqueline Presle in Young Women in Distress by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Her stage name is found: like her character, she will henceforth be called Micheline “Presle”.

Micheline was a star of the 1940s, she had a string of successes, from Lost paradise from Abel Gance in 1940 to suet ball by Christian-Jaque in 1945. But the consecration came in 1944 with Falbalasby Jacques Becker, restored by Studiocanal in 2021. “It’s a revelation for Jean-Paul Gaultier, the film that decided him to work in fashion”, explains Jean Ollé-Laprune.

In 1947, she thrilled the screens, with the sulphurous Devil in body by Claude Autant-Lara, inspired by the novel by Raymond Radiguet. She plays Marthe Grangier, a young woman who strikes up an idyll with a high school student, while her husband is at the front during the Great War. Her on-screen partner is a young actor still little known to the general public, and whom she imposed herself: his name is Gérard Philipe.

After having followed her husband William Marshall to Hollywood, where she would not succeed in imposing herself, Micheline Presle returned to France, divorced, in 1953. “Upon her return, she worked in auteur films as well as in comedies, and did not hesitate to accept a role with young directors still little known to the public”, analyzes Jean Ollé-Laprune. She will notably be nominated for the César for best actress in a supporting role for I Want to Go Home (1989) by Alain Resnais, contemporary director of the New Wave.

A modern actress

Micheline Presle signs in 1971 the manifesto of the 343 in The new observer, calling for the legalization of abortion. This commitment is illustrated in some of its resolutely modern roles, such as in The love of a woman (1954), an early feminist film by director Jean Grémillon. But it’s mostly with the TV series The Saintes Cheries from 1965 to 1970, in which she plays Ève Lagarde, a Parisian bourgeois who wishes to emancipate herself, that she marks a generation.

At the time of the ORTF, the actress invites herself on the small screen in the homes of the French, an initiative not very widespread among the stars of the cinema. She will then shoot with her daughter Tonie Marshall, director who died in 2020, notably in comedy Venus Beauty (Institute) in 1999, which won four Césars.

Today, Micheline Presle left the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens, one of her favorite places to walk, for the National House of Artists in Nogent-sur-Marne, where she lives. She prefers to remain discreet, and her centenary will not change anything. «I do not like talk about my age. It doesn’t doesn’t interest me at all.” she said recently to Parisian. “She seems to prefer living in the present than in the past.», confirms Jean Ollé-Laprune, who had the opportunity to meet her during his career. Many evoke his modesty, his curiosity, his unconditional love for the 7th art. «He’s also a very funny person, whom you feel like you know right away.” assures the film historian.