Making Her Future Now

Hearing first that seductive, husky voice--which has become familiar through scores of films since 1961’s “Jules and Jim”--does not prepare you for the sight of Jeanne Moreau, even if you’ve been acquainted with her for more than 25 years.

That’s because she’s become dramatically slimmer than she’s been in years, and only six weeks ago she cut off her trademark long hair. The result is a youthful gamine look that matches her indomitable zest for life.

“I don’t look anything like I do in the film,” she says, referring to her appearance in Ismail Merchant’s “The Proprietor,” which opens Friday at the Westside Pavilion. Nino Cerruti designed an elegant wardrobe for Moreau’s character, a renowned French novelist residing in New York, who returns to Paris for the first time in 30 years to confront her past.

“Now I can’t wear any of those beautiful clothes,” Moreau says without too much regret, sitting on a couch in a West Hollywood hotel suite. She credits a Paris doctor for getting her to change her eating habits, basically exchanging sugar and starches for fruits and vegetables. “It was easy to do,” she says.

At 68, Moreau, dressed in a coral jacket over cream pants, seems eternally glamorous and is busier than ever, promoting “The Proprietor,” preparing to direct her third picture and having just finished acting in three other films. She served as president of film festival juries at Cannes last year and recently at Montreal. She also presides over Equinox, a workshop for screenwriters that meets every other year in a chateau near Bordeaux. She has also become a godmother to a Tibetan girl.

Moreau is surely the most internationally renowned alumna of the Comedie Francaise since Sarah Bernhardt and is the grande dame of the international cinema, having worked for directors, both legendary and novice, the world over. Yet she’s as unpretentious as she is vital, remaining unfazed, for instance, by an incident during the hectic filming of “The Proprietor” when she inadvertently got locked behind a fence in Central Park. She was stuck there until Merchant was able to persuade the “Eraser” crew, shooting nearby, to lend him a ladder.

“That didn’t bother me,” she says. “That kind of thing happens many, many times in European productions. Once you know who you are in the film, when you relate deeply to the character, such difficulties, changes in location, don’t matter. We are who we are, and as in life, we just deal with it. We were supposed to shoot in Geoffrey Beene’s store, but we had to move to Bergdorf Goodman. Why not? That’s the fun of it. . . . I didn’t become an actress to have life unfold according to an architect’s blueprint.”

One of the most amusing incidents during “The Proprietor’s” European shoot occurred when the management of Versailles’ Trianon Palace Hotel, where Moreau was spending weekends to escape Paris’ extreme summer heat, refused to let Merchant film there. He got around that by making a reservation for a suite for the maharajah of Jodhpur and explaining that Moreau would be interviewing the maharajah for French TV. He passed himself off as the maharajah, confident that his friend, the real maharajah, would be amused if he found out.

“Huge arrangements of flowers were rolled in, then quantities of fruits and cakes, and then all the champagne and the liquor you could imagine--all for the maharajah. But that wasn’t all: We had to tiptoe around”--Moreau gets up from the couch to demonstrate--”so as not to wake up the Romanian soccer team. They were sleeping next door during the day and would be playing the French team that evening. Then there were these renovations going on; Ismail handled that by simply saying to the workmen, at 8 a.m., ‘You’re dismissed for the day, you can go home.’

“There is no ‘no’ for Ismail. With any setback, he says, ‘It’s a blessing in disguise,’ and since something good--or better--always seems to come around for Ismail, he’s right.”

Moreau didn’t base her eminent novelist on any actual person but says that through her early friendship with Jean Cocteau, and later on her own, she met many great writers. (“I never research very precisely,” she adds, “I just let things come up to me.”)

Moreau was born to a French father and an English mother, who ran a small Paris hotel. One of its permanent guests was a famous turn-of-the-century courtesan, Amelie D’Alencon, who captured the youthful Moreau’s imagination. Moreau was married to actor-director Jean-Louis Richard and, much later, director William Friedkin. Richard and Moreau have a son, Jerome, now 47, a painter who has lived in Newport Beach the past six years.

She recently completed Billy Hopkins’ “I Love You, I Love You Not,” shot in New York and Germany. “It’s about a relationship between a young girl, played by Claire Danes--she’s very talented--and her grandmother, a survivor of the camps.”

Another film, as yet untitled, was done in Paris in English and with the pop singer Vanessa Paradis. “It’s a fairy tale,” she says, ‘I never research [my roles] very precisely. I just let things come up to me.’

Also in the can is “Witch Way Love,” in which Moreau stars as a witch who helps women learn how to dress and how to deal with lovers.

Moreau’s most exciting project would return her to directing the Joyce Carol Oates story “Solstice” with Oates adapting her own novel and Merchant producing. The script is heading for its third draft, with location scouting in New England about to begin. “It’s a passionate relationship between two women who meet quite inadvertently, and the meeting results in an incredible transformation in the life of one of them,” Moreau says. “It’s very romantic but not sexually oriented. It’s one of those encounters that you have in life once or twice and you have to deal with it.

“There are two beautiful parts for American actresses--and there are so many good American actresses! I thought Susan Sarandon did an incredible job in ‘Dead Man Walking,’ and I think Jessica Lange is amazing. Diane Keaton is wonderful in ‘The First Wives Club,’ which is really funny. Sharon Stone is a very special person. We met last year and stay in touch. I love her, I really respect her. Like her, I didn’t become famous until I was past 30.”

Reminiscing about her friend George Cukor, who had hoped to direct her, she recalled a remark he once made about the past: “I don’t live in it, but I don’t turn my back on it either.” Agreeing, Moreau declares, “I am my past, I am my present, and I carry my future within me. You can’t stay put; the world is constantly changing. I’m open to anything--and that’s how I’ve met so many beautiful people and had so many incredible experiences.”