Stephane Audran and the Challenge of the Unknown

One of the key pleasures of the Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” which won the Oscar for best foreign film, is that it is a personal triumph for its star, French actress Stephane Audran.

She will forever be associated with the droll thrillers of her former husband, Claude Chabrol, who has always been fascinated with the connection between bourgeois repression and violent crime. But this sly and delightful film, based on an Isak Dinesen tale, establishes Audran’s separate, above-the-title identity as a resourceful and enduring actress.

“The Oscar nomination was unexpected. It was wonderful, a miracle!” exclaimed Audran, relaxing in her Westwood hotel room with the film’s director, Gabriel Axel, during a recent Southern California visit. “We didn’t do the film to get awards, but because we believed in it.”

Despite a hectic schedule, Audran, now in her 40s, looked smashing, setting off her reddish hair with an all-black outfit. Audran, whose English is secure, has always been glamorous but not always as confident as she is now. For a long time she was concerned that she would be restricted to working only with Chabrol. However, it was Chabrol’s 1978 “Violette” that proved to be a turning point in her career and her life. (During shooting her marriage broke up, but she and Chabrol have continued to work together from time to time.)

The film inspired Bertrand Tavernier to cast Audran in his superb 1982 “Coup de Torchon” as the flashy, bored wife of Philippe Noiret’s ineffectual French colonial police chief, and Axel to cast her in “Babette’s Feast” as a political refugee who in 1871 finds shelter and security in Jutland as the selflessly devoted cook and housekeeper to a pair of deeply religious spinster sisters.

Audran, in “Violette,” played an entirely different kind of person--the loving but strict and intensely puritanical mother to the young woman who in the 1930s became the Lizzie Borden of France. The only thing these three characters have in common is that they are played by Audran with a total selflessness. She also played Laurence Olivier’s loyal, patrician mistress in “Brideshead Revisited” and even came to Hollywood to play the femme fatale in “The Black Bird,” a spoofy sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.”

“There’s a Babette in all of us,” said Audran, referring to the glorious feast the French woman prepares as an expression of love and gratitude. “She’s a magician who creates a miracle--and I believe in miracles. But you must take her story as a petite conte --a fable.”

“To us, Stephane is a Parisienne,” said Axel, who works in French television and has waited years to get “Babette’s Feast” made. “She opens a door differently from a Danish woman, she even moves differently. Now this is very important. It wouldn’t have been the same with a Danish actress.”

Axel, who resembles the late, distinguished Swedish star Gunnar Bjornstrand, said he strove hard to achieve the film’s faint, gentle humor, always lurking just beneath the surface. “We had to avoid farce, and we did everything possible to respect Isak Dinesen and her style. We tried not to betray her.”

“After I said yes and signed the contract, Gabriel said it would be so nice if I would say a few words in Danish,” Audran recalled. “Two or three words would be easy. But two or three words became two or three sentences! He was very clever! But only Gabriel, who has spent so much of his life in France, could have made this film. He knew exactly how this French woman would appear to the old ladies and the villagers--how strange she would seem to them. He knows the differences; thank God, he’s good! I am ashamed that no French producer would accept this film as a co-production. Ha! When we speak about a crisis in the French cinema, you know it is a crisis of the imagination!”

Even so, Audran has been so busy that, she says, it bores her to reel off one title after another. “Really, I never planned to work so much,” she sighed. Of late she has been alternating French films with brief appearances in such American miniseries as “Mistral’s Daughter” and “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

One of the films that has pleased her the most is Jean-Pierre Mocky’s comedy “The Four Seasons of Love,” a success in France that has yet to be released in the United States and which reminds her of the French-Canadian film “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.” “Mocky is so crazy! He says ‘Action!’ when we’re rehearsing, even when we’re having lunch. But it was thrilling to work with him. Denise Grey and Charles Vanel are this couple who are celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary. Vanel is 95, and he plays a 100-year-old retired head of a perfume business.”

Audran affectionately spoke of her son Thomas Chabrol. Several years ago he made a couple of films as a tall, gangly teen-ager with the heart-shaped face of his mother. Now he’s a fledgling director in TV. “He’s very funny,” said Audran, “as funny as his father. He makes these 30-second shorts--that’s long enough for him now--for our best channel, the one that’s not the slave of anybody.”

The irony is that “Babette’s Feast” has brought stardom to Stephane Audran just at a time when she has grown into a remarkably accomplished character actress, unafraid even of playing out-and-out grotesques. “I like challenges,” she said, “and I like to jump into the unknown.”