Claude Jade


Claude Marcelle Jorré, better known as Claude Jade, was a French actress. She starred as Christine in François Truffaut's three films Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board and Love on the Run. Jade acted in theatre, film and television. Her film work outside France included the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Japan. She was most famous on television as the heroine of the mysterious adventure series The Island of Thirty Coffins. She was also the leading actress in the first French daily soap opera, Cap des Pins. Her last role was playing Célimène in the 2006 film Célimène et le cardinal.

Early life

The daughter of university professors, Jade spent three years at Dijon's Conservatory of Dramatic Art. She moved to Paris and became a student of Jean-Laurent Cochet at the Edouard VII theater, and began acting in television productions, including a leading role in TV series Les oiseaux rares.

Career

Early work and films with François Truffaut (1960s)

While at Dijon's Conservatory of Dramatic Art, in 1964 she played on stage 40 times the part of Agnès in Molière's L'école des femmes. In 1966 she won the Prix de Comédie for Jean Giraudoux's stage play Ondine, performed at the Comédie Boulogne.
While performing as Frida in Pirandello's Henri IV, in a production by Sacha Pitoëff at the Théâtre Moderne, Jade was discovered by New Wave film director François Truffaut. He was "completely taken by her beauty, her manners, her kindness, and her joie de vivre", and cast her in the role of Christine Darbon in Stolen Kisses. During the filming, Truffaut fell in love with her, and there was talk of marriage. Truffaut dubbed Claude Jade “French cinema’s little sweetheart” and the director and his muse were soon a couple in real life, although Truffaut changed his mind about marrying her the night before their wedding.
American critic Pauline Kael wrote that Jade "seems a less ethereal, more practical Catherine Deneuve".
Playing the same character at different stages of her life, Jade appeared in three Truffaut films: loved from a distance in Stolen Kisses; married and misled in Bed and Board ; and divorced but still on good terms in Love on the Run.
Some months after Truffaut's Stolen Kisses Claude Jade starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, as Michèle Picard, a secret agent's anxious daughter, married to a reporter. Recommended to Hitchcock by Truffaut, she was 19 years old when cast, with Dany Robin playing her mother. Hitchcock said he chose the two actresses to provide glamor, and later quipped, "Claude Jade is a rather quiet young lady, but I wouldn't guarantee about her behavior in a taxi". Jade recounted that they "talked in a Paris hotel about cooking, and I gave him my recipe for soufflé and told him I liked Strangers on a Train, and that was that."
Hitchcock said she resembled his former star Grace Kelly, and in France she was a younger Danielle Darrieux. Some of her scenes were deleted and restored for the director's cut of Topaz in 1999. Topaz was Jade's only Hollywood film. Universal Pictures offered her a seven-year contract, which she turned down reportedly because she preferred to work in French.
She had a leading role as Linda in Sous le signe de Monte-Cristo by André Hunebelle, a modern version of Alexandre Dumas' novel. Here, the 19-year-old actress starred alongside French cinema veterans like Pierre Brasseur and Michel Auclair.
Jade starred in Édouard Molinaro's My Uncle Benjamin alongside Jacques Brel. As Manette she refuses Brel's advances until he produces a marriage contract. At the End Manette realizes she prefers happiness to a marriage contract after all.
Her career continued in Belgium, where she played a young English teacher who is fatally intrigued by a murderer in the 1969 film The Witness. Her fiancé in the movie was played by Jean-Claude Dauphin, to whom she was engaged at the time in real life. Also in 1969, she starred as Helena in Le Songe d'une nuit d'été, a made-for-television film adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Jean-Christophe Averty.

1970s

Director Tony Richardson's film Nijinsky , based on a screenplay by Edward Albee, was canceled during pre-production by producer Harry Saltzman. It was to have starred Jade as Vaslav Nijinsky's wife, with Rudolf Nureyev as Nijinsky and Paul Scofield as his lover Sergei Diaghilev.
In 1970 she reprised her part as Christine from Stolen Kisses in Truffaut's Bed and Board as a married woman. The Truffaut films influenced her type as lovingly gentle modern young woman in contemporary cinema, which she contrasted in ambivalent figures: Critic Vincent Canby praised her work in Gérard Brach's The Boat on the Grass, in which she starred as Eleonore, a young girl who comes between two friends. She starred in Hearth Fires as Laura, a daughter who wants to reconcile her parents and who falls in love with her mother's best friend. Alongside Robert Hossein she played the priest's love, Françoise, in Forbidden Priests. In Home Sweet Home, she played a hardened nurse who is changed by a love affair with a social worker.
Jade starred in three Italian films: Number One, as a private investigator; La ragazza di via Condotti, as Tiffany, the girlfriend of a private eye ; and A Spiral of Mist, as Maria Teresa, an unhappily married woman, directed by Eriprando Visconti. She played a nun in Kita No Misaki - Cap du Nord by Japanese director Kei Kumai and played a dual role in The Choice. In the same year, she starred as Penny Vanderwood in Thinking Robots, based on a horror novel by George Langelaan. Among other films of the 1970s were Malicious Pleasure, Trop c'est trop and the romantic comedy The Pawn, in which she starred as a young widow who wins the heart of her son's teacher. One year later Claude Jade played the part of Christine Doinel for the third time in Truffaut's Love on the Run.
In 1970 she starred as orphan Françoise in the miniseries Mauregard, directed by Truffaut's co-writer Claude de Givray. Other TV roles in the decade were Sheherazade, Louise de La Vallière, and Lucile Desmoulins. She starred in such television movies as Mamie Rose, La Mandragore, Monsieur Seul, Fou comme François, Les anneaux de Bicêtre, Ulysse est revenu, and, in her biggest success of that decade, The Island of Thirty Coffins, a 1979 series in which she portrayed heroine Veronique d'Hergemont.

1980s

In the 1980s, Jade moved to Moscow for three years with her husband Bernard Coste, a French diplomat, and her son Pierre Coste. She starred in two Soviet films. In Teheran 43, she played the mysterious terrorist Françoise, with Alain Delon and an international cast. For Sergei Yutkevich's Lenin in Paris, she played the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand, but without the rumored love affair with Vladimir Lenin.
Among her other film roles in the 1980s were the arrested philosophy prof in Schools Falling Apart, the lawyer Valouin in A Captain's Honor, the Vicki Baum-heroine Evelyne Droste in Rendezvous in Paris and the mysterious Alice in René Féret's thriller The Man Who Wasn't There.
She also appeared in TV movies, such as the thriller La grotte aux loups ; the drama Nous ne l'avons pas assez aimée ; Treize ; a dual role in Lise et Laura ; A Girl in the Sunflowers ; the Italian miniseries Voglia di volare ; the French-Spanish-Canadian-German miniseries Le grand secret and in episode L'amie d'enfance of the series Commissaire Moulin.

1990s

During the 1990s Jade worked mainly in television, such as the TV series La tête en l'air and Fleur bleue, as guest star in Une femme d'honneur, Inspecteur Moretti, Julie Lescaut and Navarro. TV movies included L'Éternité devant soi, Le bonheur des autres, Eugénie Grandet and Porté disparu. From 1998 to 2000 she was the lead actress in the series Tide of Life ''. Her last U.S. acting part was a guest appearance on The Hitchhiker: in the episode Windows she is Monique, who shoots her neighbor David Marshall Grant at the end.
Jade's film roles in cinemas in 1990s included Gabrielle Martin, a mother betrayed by her husband, in Tableau d'honneur. This was followed by her performance as shy lesbian Caroline in Jean-Pierre Mocky's Bonsoir. In 1998, she played a governor's wife, Reine Schmaltz, who saves herself on a lifeboat in the historical movie The Raft of the Medusa.

2000s

In her last decade, Jade's work included the TV movie Sans famille ; the series La Crim, and Groupe Flag. She also appeared in an episode of the short film series Drug Scenes ; and in the short À San Remo.

Theatrical work

Jade was a member of Jean Meyer's theatre company in Lyon, appearing in plays by Jean Giraudoux ; Henry de Montherlant ; James Joyce ; Racine ; and Balzac. She took roles in plays by Vladimir Volkoff ; Catherine Decours ; Michel Vinaver, Alfred de Musset and others. She worked onstage in Lyon, Nantes, Dijon and Paris.
Many plays were adapted for TV, such as her performances as Helena in Shakespeares Midsummer Night's Dream; her Sylvie in Marcel Aymés Les oiseaux de lune; her Colomba in Jules Romains's adaptation of Ben Johnson's Volpone; her Clarisse in Jacques Deval's Il y a longtemps que je t'aime; her title role in Jules Supervielle's Shéhérazade; and her Louise de La Vallière in Le château perdu. Her last stage role was as Célimène in Jacques Rampal's Celimene and the Cardinal.