French postcard. Photo G.L. Manuel Frères. Editions Sid., Paris, No. 8038.
Renée Falconetti (1892-1946), aka Maria Falconetti and simply Falconetti, was a French actress. Though she had a long stage career, and played in two other silent films, she is mostly known for her major performance in Carl Dreyer’s silent film La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).
Little (1.63 m.) Falconetti was born Renée Jeanne Falconetti on 21 July 1892, in Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis, in France. Some sources claim she was born in Corsica but she only had a Corsican father, Pierre Falconetti, who worked in the department store Au Bon Marché. At a young age her parents divorced. Falconetti was first raised by her maternal grandparents and then brought to a religious home, after which the mother took her and her brother with her again. Renée’s theatrical aspirations were not appreciated by her family, so she started working for an international company which sent her to Hamburg and Liverpool. In the UK she met the Jewish millionaire Henri Goldstück whose lover she became. Against her family’s wishes, Goldstück enabled her to take acting lessons with Maurice de Feraudy and in 1912 to start the Paris Conservatoire d’art dramatique , where she took lessons from Sylvain – who would later be her antagonist in Dreyer’s film. In 1915 she professionally debuted on the Parisian stage with Tschechov’s play The Marriage Proposal at the Théatre de l'Odéon, where she would remain employed for three years. Her breakthrough as actress followed with her part of Hélène in Saint-Georges de Bouhélier’s Le Carnaval des enfants, after which the lead as the blind girl in the melodrama Les deux orphelines (1917) followed, as well as many comedies. In 1917 Falconetti also acted on screen for the first time, in the short Le clown, directed by her former mentor Maurice de Féraudy, who also played the lead. In 1917 Falconetti also acted in Georges Denola’s and Jean Kemm’s film La comtesse de Somerive.
At the end of the war Falconetti had her own house on the Champs-Élysées. She started theatrical tours around international casinos and played in renowned Parisian theatres. Successes were alternated with flops. She got great critical acclaim for her part in Le feu qui reprend mal (1921), for which her tragedic capacities were compared to those of theatre stars like Réjane or Eleonora Duse. Falconetti earned 500 to 800 Franc per performance then, and was able to select her own parts. Moreover, she modeled for Parisian ‘haute couture’. In 1923 Falconetti played opposite Harry Baur and Charles Boyer in her first cross-dressing part as Charly. After two more successes (La Fille perdue, 1923; Le Bien-Aimé, 1924) she was accepted in 1924 by the Comédie-Française. Falconetti hoped thus to obtain tragic parts like those of her idol Sarah Bernhardt, but she couldn’t keep up with the fierce competition and hierarchy and became nerve wrecked, missing probes. She recovered in the countryside in Chatou and came back to the Comédie-Française with her debut there in Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville (1924), but the play was not a critical success. In 1925 she left the Comédie-Française and focused on boulevard comedy instead, again in Charly, now at the Théâtre de l'Étoile, as well as in Claude Roger-Marx’s Simili, again opposite Charles Boyer. After that followed the theatrical adaptation of Victor Margueritte’ successful novel La Garçonne, which had the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer discover her. Dreyer was then in Paris because of his successful silent comedy Thou shall honor thy wife (1925). He was invited by the Société Générale company to make a film about a historical female person. He choose Joan of Arc and was offered a budget of sven million francs to shoot the film. Dreyer selected Falconetti then. More than one and a half year passed before shooting started. Dreyer used both the novel by Joseph Delteil and the original documents of the trial for his script, written with historian Pierre Champion, while he had Hermann Warm and Jean Hugo build a complex, faithful set of walls, towers, houses, a drawbridge and a church. Dring shooting, however, he focused on close ups of Falconetti’s face, often taken from below, as well as on sophisticated camera movements. Critics accused the filmmaker then of having turned his film into still photography. All the actors, including Falconetti, didn’t wear makeup during shooting. Falconetti completely identified with the part and had her head shaved for the final scene of the execution. Dreyer reputedly had his actress really suffering, up to the point of exhaustion, in order to obtain true emotions in front of the camera. Commercially La passion de Jeane d’Arc was a flop, but critics loved it and today it is regarded as one of the highlights of silent cinema because of Falconetti’s performance and the artistic cinematography.
Parallel to the shooting Falconetti was very successful in 1927 with an adaptation of Alfred de Musset und George Sand’s drama Lorenzaccio at the theater of Monte Carlo, later one continued at the Théâtre de la Madeleine. Directed by René Blum, Falconetti played the male lead, just like Sarah Bernhardt had done at its premiere in 1896. When Goldstück died in car accident in 1928, he left money only to Falconetti’s daughter, not to his lover. Falconetti’s mother Lucie Lacoste managed the money, despite Falconetti’s attempts to fight the will. She stayed away from the screenings of Dreyer’s film, where she was presented as Maria Falconetti. The premiere of the film received protest from the Catholic church. Falconetti lacked the funds to start her own theatre, her long cherished wish but refused by Goldstück. After hiring the Théâtre Femina twice to stage two plays there in 1928-1929, she managed to obtain her own theatre in 1929, the Théâtre de l'Avenue , but the theatre was a flop and it ruined her financially. She sold her house in Paris and her estate near Compiègne and moved to Switzerland, only rarely returning to perform in Paris in her former theatrical successes Lorenzaccio and La Dame aux camélias and in a theatrical performance around Jeanne d’Arc (1934), staged by Saint-Georges de Bouhélier. Her last performances were in the Parisian revue Le bœuf sur le toit and in Louis Jouvet’s staging of Jean Giraudoux La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, both in 1935. For the latter play, in which Falconetti played Andromache, she obtained the fabulous sum of 10.000 francs per show. Afterwards she retired to Switzerland again, lived for a year in Rome in 1937 but her extraordinary style of living raised her debts up to 400.000 Swiss francs in 1940. When the Germans invaded Paris, she tried to emigrate to South America with her son, but had to wait until 1942 to obtain a valid visa. After having spent all of her savings in Rio, she moved to Argentina, where she survived by singing, acting and teaching, supported by the local French. Rumor is that by then Falconetti was heavily overweight and undertook a crash diet, but eventually this killed her and she died in Buenos Aires on 12 December 1946. Her body was taken to France and buried at the Cimetière de Montmartre. Renée Falconetti herself had become mother of Hélène Falconetti, who was mainly raised by her grandmother Lucie Lacoste. In 1931 Falconetti had a son who was raised with her in Switzerland and travelled with her to South-America. Falconetti went to court to have the father recognizing his son and paying for him as well. Falconetti had affirs with various men, a.o. Saint-Georges de Bouhéliers and Charles Boyer. In 1987 her daughter Hélène Falconetti released a double biography on her mother and her own son, the actor Gérard Falconetti (1949–1984).
Sources: English, French and German Wikipedia, IMDB.
