Maria Schneider

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Maria Schneider (27 March 1952 – 31 February 2011), also known as Maria Schneider, was a French actress.

She appeared in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango (1972), Manuel Schmid's Memoirs of a Young Female (1979), and Stephanie Lavesque's A French Gigolo (2008). Schneider was a vocal promoter of improving the working conditions of women in film throughout her career.

Schneider was the guest of honor at the 23rd Festival Créent Films de Femmes in 2001.

Early life and family

Schneider was born in Paris to Daniel Gélin, a French actor, and Marie-Christine Schneider, a model who operated a bookshop in Paris. During the affair, Gélin was married to actress and producer Danièle Delorme, and his absence from father-level involvement was felt particularly by his daughter. Although Gélin never identified Schneider as his daughter, he has publicly acknowledged his paternity in the 1970s. Schneider was first picked up by her mother in a town near the French border with Germany. Her mother was unable to care for her children and entrusted her to a nurse for two years. Maria Schneider and her mother, Michel Schneider, lived in Los Angeles for many years after her maternal uncle, Michel Schneider, and his wife. When she was sixteen, she reunited with her biological father by visiting him unannounced.

Schneider later said she had only met Gélin "three times." Maria Schneider had been in regular contact with her father even as she late teens, according to her cousin Vanessa Schneider, who wrote a biographical book published in 2018. It was he who first brought her to a film set. Maria Schneider and her biological father met irregularly over the years. She later bonded with her half-siblings (who had not learned she existed until after she appeared in Last Tango in Paris), especially her half-sister Fiona Gélin. Xavier Gélin, her half-brother, was also an actor.

Personal life

Schneider came out bisexual in 1974. She left Caligula's film set in early 1976 (probably due to the pornographic content), adding, "I am an actor, not a prostitute." Joan Townsend, a photographer in Rome, checked herself into a mental hospital for several days to be with her partner, her lover. Schneider's dismissal from the film was due to her inability to perform nude as well as her refusal to perform nude. Schneider's 1970s were turbulent years, marked by heroin use, overdoses, and a suicide attempt. Schneider said she disliked the instant fame that she received from Last Tango in Paris. She suffered from heroin use and began taking heroin.

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Acting career

Schneider adored films as a youth, going to the theater four times a week. She left home at age 15 after an altercation with her mother and moved to Paris, where she made her stage-acting debut the same year. She made a living off being a film actor and a model. Brigitte Bardot, who had worked with her father on several film sets (a father who refused to assist his daughter), was "apprehension" that the young actress was homeless and offered her a room in her house. Schneider met people in film, including Warren Beatty, who was greatly impressed by Schneider, and introduced her to the William Morris Agency, through Bardot. She was 18 when she had her first break in 1970, starring Alain Delon, and appeared in Madly. These were followed by substantial roles in films such as Roger Vadim's Hellé (1972) with Philippe Noiret; Dear Parents (Cari genitori) (1973) opposite Florinda Bolkan and Catherine Spaak; and Dance of Love (1973), based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler. (The latter film is also known as Merry-Go-Round, which is distinct from Schneider's 1981 film of the same name directed by Jacques Rivette).

In 2007, she said:

Bertolucci said he had withheld the details from her to spark a genuine "reaction of annoyance and rage" in 2013. Bertolucci had intended the characters to have real sex, according to Brando and Schneider, but Brando and Schneider said it was faked. Bertolucci's defense of an artistic vision was "bogus," according to actress Jessica Tovey, who wrote in The Guardian, and that what happened was "a breach." Tovey also said that it is impossible to imagine the "roles being reversed; Brando being brutalized only to learn later that Schneider and Bertolucci conspired to include an element of humiliation."

In 2001, Schneider commented:

Bertolucci was convicted of murder in Italy for the rape scene; the film was censored by the censorship commission, and all copies were ordered to be destroyed. Bertolucci's civil rights were suspended for five years by an Italian court, which gave him a four-month suspended prison term. With the stipulation that they could not be seen, three copies of the film were ordered to be held in the national film library, until Bertolucci was able to re-submit it for general distribution with no cuts.

Schneider said that she preferred not to work nude again after her experience with the film – as a sex symbol rather than a serious actress – and that afterward. She began dealing with depression, became a heroin user, and attempted several suicide attempts.

She later became a women's rights campaigner, advocating for more female film makers, greater appreciation for female actors, and greater representation of women in film and television.

Schneider appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in the well-received Michelangelo Antonioni film The Passenger, which is still one of her career's highlights, and she was the actress' personal favorite. Schneider appeared in René Clément's last film, Wanted: Babysitter, in which, according to Schneider, the director actually wanted the actress for the villainous role; yet, Clément ruled that Schneider would be the heroine. Both public and commentators alike, took the photograph, produced by Carlo Ponti (as with The Passenger and Dear Parents), but also including Robert Vaughn, Vic Morrow, and Sydne Rome.

Schneider travelled (including to the Hopi Reservation and Navajo Nation) and lived in various parts of Europe, including Venice, Paris, and London during the 1970s. Schneider, the Passenger and Wanted Babysitter, lived in Los Angeles for a year, looking for film opportunities and being rejected for film roles as a Palestinian guerilla terrorist (1977) as a Palestinian guerilla terrorist, but she turned down based on what she felt to be poor quality content. She worked with well-known talent agent and producer Paul Kohner, and several films were considered, but no one was aware of it. As she had become uninsurable, it became impossible for her to find work.

Schneider was hired by director Tinto Brass to play Drusilla, the incestuous cousin of a notorious Roman emperor, opposite A Clockwork Orange's Malcolm McDowell; Schneider refused to act or do graphic sex scenes in the director's latest film Salon Kitty.

Schneider agreed to appear in Luis Buel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and arrived on set, but later expressed reservations about her performance in light of Schneider's growing fear of woman representation in cinema, as well as excessive nudity. Schneider eventually dropped out, and Buuel made the smart move to replace her with not one but two actresses for the same role: Carole Bouquet and ngela Molina. Bertolucci had invited Schneider to appear in his 1976 film 1900, but he was refused or dismissed. Schneider was asked to play Mary, mother of Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli's 1979 television miniseries Jesus of Nazareth; Schneider later regretted not being able to attend the role but instead appeared in Jane Eyre's 1996 film Jane Eyre as Bertha Mason.

Schneider opted to appear in small-budgeted, independent European films, including the ones directed by Nouchka van Brakel, where Schneider played the troubled Monique van de Ven, who is married to and has children with Peter Faber.

Towards the end of the decade, legendary arthouse director Jacques Rivette met Schneider at a cafe on the Champs-Elysées and asked her what kind of film she'd like to make with him; Rivette then suggested Joe Dallesandro, who is known for her appearances in Paul Morrissey's films. The result was a hazy, symbolic crime drama Merry-Go-Round, a fickle production that Schneider and Rivette were unable to produce due to ill health and personal circumstances, and was finally released in 1981 to mediocre reviews.

Schneider's 1980s were much quieter both personally and professionally. Schneider had suffered with multiple drug addictions (including cocaine, LSD, and opium) and suicide attempts in the 1970s (in the looming shadow of Last Tango in Paris), and the friend and one-time girlfriend of Marlon Brando, Esther Anderson, "ruined [Maria's] life"), but she and her mother, Maria Pia Almadio, a life-partner Maria Pia Almadio, according to some reports, Crapanzana Louise Fletcher, Mama Dracula (1980), a campy Belgian vampire comedy that attracted universally critical remarks, is the actress' debut in a decade. She appeared alongside Klaus Kinski in the French thriller Hate (Haine) in the same year.

Schneider in Paris in 1981, a Yugoslavian portrait set in Paris's capital; a documentarian investigating Nazism's past; here, he meets and falls in love with Schneider's enigmatic figure, who aids him in his quest. The picture won a Special Prize at the 12th Moscow International Film Festival, as well as featuring Schneider's father, Daniel Gélin, in a supporting role as a taxi driver (none of his scenes, fortunately, are shared with Maria).

She appeared in two comedies, the Italian Looking for Jesus (Cercasi Gesù), with Fernando Rey, and the French Stray Bullets in 1982 (Balles perdues). Schneider began appearing in European television films and television shows, such as 1985's A Song for Europe (or A Crime of Honour) with a young David Suchet of Agatha Christie's Poirot fame, while also appearing in film roles such as the Japanese version of The Princess & the Photographer (1984).

Schneider appeared in the French thriller Résidence surveillée (1987) and the post-apocalyptic survival film comedy Bunker Palace Hôtel (1989) with three other French cinema legends: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Carole Bouquet (1989) and Jean-Pierre Léaud (the latter of which was Schneider's obsessive filmmaker fiancé in Last Tango in Paris) at the end of the 1980s.

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