Jeanne Moreau

Jeanne Moreau (1928-2017), one of the greatest actresses of French cinema, was also a singer with a fragile, haunted voice. In the spring of 1963 she came to Montreux for the Rose d’Or.

Jeanne Moreau in Montreux

May 1963: passing through for the Rose d’Or

Passing through Montreux to take part in the Rose d’Or, the town’s international television festival, Jeanne Moreau took the chance to visit her son Jérôme, born of her 1949 marriage to the director Jean-Louis Richard. The boy was a pupil at the Lycée Jaccard, a private boarding school for boys at Pully, on the shore of Lake Geneva, near Lausanne. The RTS camera caught her on 3 May 1963 for the programme “Carrefour”.

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The actress who sang

A radiant actress, Jeanne Moreau was also a singer. In 1962, in François Truffaut’s film “Jules et Jim”, she sang for the first time “Le Tourbillon de la vie”, which launched her in song. She recorded several albums with Serge Rezvani, among them “J’ai la mémoire qui flanche”, or with Marguerite Duras, who wrote the words of “India Song” for her.