Biography of Anne Wiazemsky

Anne Wiazemsky (born 14 May 1947 in Berlin; died 5 October 2017 in Paris) was a French actress, director and writer. She became known through films by Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and later developed a literary body of work in which memory, family and cinema intersected.

Background and childhood

Wiazemsky was born in Berlin. Her father Yvan Wiazemsky was a French diplomat of Russian background, and her mother Claire Mauriac was the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning writer François Mauriac. Because of her father's diplomatic career the family lived in several countries, including Switzerland and Venezuela. After her father's death, Anne Wiazemsky returned to Paris in 1962.

Bresson and the beginning in cinema

At eighteen Wiazemsky appeared in Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar. The film became a key work of European cinema and made her known as the performer of a quiet, vulnerable and elusive figure. In later memoirs she also described the shoot as an ambivalent experience, marked by artistic severity and personal pressure.

Godard and the New Wave years

In 1967 Wiazemsky played in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise as a student caught in political theory and revolutionary language. In the same year she married Godard. Films such as Week End and One Plus One followed. Wiazemsky became part of a phase in which French cinema, the student movement and political radicalisation stood close together. Her roles were not merely accompaniment to a director, but figures of a generation searching for new images and new words.

Pasolini and departure from the star image

Pier Paolo Pasolini also cast Wiazemsky, including in Teorema and Porcile. In the 1970s she continued to work in film, but increasingly moved away from the image of the young New Wave actress. She later also directed television work. The turn to literature was not a break, but a shift: she now told stories herself instead of being shaped only by the gaze of others.

Writer

From the late 1980s onward Wiazemsky published novels and autobiographically shaped books. Works such as Canines, Une poignée de gens, Jeune fille and Un an après connected family history, memory and the experience of cinema. She received several literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des lycéens and the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française. Her books gave her a second public voice.

Farewell

Anne Wiazemsky died of cancer in Paris on 5 October 2017. She was 70 years old. Her work remains situated between film and literature: the story of a woman who first became a projection surface of European auteur cinema and later wrote her own spaces of memory.