A French Star Returns to the Cinema, Legend Intact : Movies: At 65, Jeanne Moreau remains one of the best pure film actors in the world. Her latest role is in the British comedy ‘The Summer House.’

In “The Summer House,” a British comedy of wedding plans gone awry, Joan Plowright, the dour mother of the dorky groom, answers a knock at her door.

There, slouching at the door, is the bride’s aunt. After a few tense seconds, she slips a pint of whiskey out from under her coat, offering to share its contents with Plowright. The aunt’s half-pout-half-grin suggests both allure and danger. The deep, dark eyes suggest boundless possibilities for mischief and risk. She’s a savvy old cat who has plenty of kitten in her.

I remember now, you say to yourself. Jeanne Moreau!

Not that Moreau doesn’t make her presence known in the film well before this scene. As Lili, a worldly flame-haired woman whose flamboyance and freewheeling wit dissipate the misty gloom of late 1950s Croydon, Moreau dominates every frame she’s in. Her smoke-cured voice is reminiscent of comparable legends like Dietrich or Bankhead.

But you know that business she does with her eyes at the door? Only Moreau can be traced to such furtive emissions of magic. At 65, the French star remains one of the best pure film actors in the world, able to evoke a matchless range of reaction and interpretation from an imperious scowl or shy smile.

“Well, cinema is not so much about words, is it? It’s about image,” she said last week in a Park Avenue hotel suite. “That’s why I love the camera. Because it takes in everything, if you’re not reluctant to give to it.”

In person, she’s smaller than you expect. She takes your hand to shake and it’s clear she’s also warmer than you expect. Such casual acceptance of self and the world-at-large went into the character of Lili. Which is one of the things Moreau liked about the role.

“What’s extraordinary about Lili is that she knows no boundaries. She’s impertinent and I like that about her. What she has . . . is that freedom you get when you’re older. For men, it’s different. When you’re a woman, there are things you don’t allow yourself to say or do because it’s not feminine. Maybe shocking, but not . . . acceptable.

“And the privilege of aging--and I tell you it’s a privilege--is that you find you can finally speak up! And to hell with what somebody thinks!”

*

Younger audiences might wonder, “Jeanne who?” But older ones remember only the lush sensuality that caught the world’s eye in Louis Malle’s first films, “Ascenseur pour l’eschafuad” (“Elevator to the Gallows”) (1957) and “The Lovers” (1958). They especially remember Moreau as Catherine, the complex, enigmatic hypotenuse of a love triangle in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” (1961).

Catherine elevated Moreau to screen legend. Her subsequent work for such master directors as Orson Welles (“Chimes at Midnight”), Luis Bunuel (“Diary of a Chambermaid”) and Michelangelo Antonioni (“La Notte”) helped make her a symbol, not only of the French New Wave films of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, but also of a state of mind that views films as art more than product. It seemed a lot easier to embrace this approach in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

“Yes, but you see, the era allowed that,” she says. “Back then, the image was precious because you weren’t able to pick up a video of the film shortly after it was made and watch it over and over again.”

*

Moreau was born in Paris to a French father, a restaurateur, and a British mother, a dancer. As a child, she wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps, (“I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn,” she says) but she ended up acting instead, beginning with a four-year stint at the the Comedie Francaise and a season with the Theatre National Populaire. She edged into films in the early 1950s. Among her earliest credits was something called “Demonique,” released elsewhere as “The She Wolves.”

Moreau’s love life became almost as legendary as her professional accomplishments. She was romantically linked, at one time or another, with Truffaut, Malle and British director Tony Richardson. She was married three times, the last time to American director William Friedkin, whom she divorced in 1980.

Her activity trailed off after that, reportedly due to depression over the divorce. She returned to stage acting in the early 1980s with “Le Recit de la Servante Zerline,” a one-woman show that went on a triumphant two-year European tour and then stepped up her film work, appearing in Wim Wenders’ “Till the End of the World” and Peter Handke’s “Absence,” among others.

Now nearing the end of her year as president of the Commission of Advance on Receipts of the Centre National du Cinema, Moreau is acutely aware of the furor over a proposal in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that France drop quotas limiting the number of American movies and television programs that can be shown there.

During the interview, she is told that both sides have agreed to omit the film and TV industries from the GATT accord, leaving France and the U.S. to battle it out, one-on-one in the future.

“I’m glad,” she says. “I was very concerned for many reasons. One was the entire American . . . exploitation of the crisis. I hated that.”