Magnificent Moreau

Few actresses can match Jeanne Moreau’s four decades of international stardom. But not until Thursday’s elegant tribute to her had the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored a French actress in such a manner, observed academy President Robert Rehme.

After nearly two hours of carefully selected clips from her 50-year screen career, Moreau, introduced by her friend Sharon Stone, the evening’s host, stood before the sold-out audience in the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the academy headquarters in Beverly Hills.

“I don’t go down memory lane, I don’t give a damn about the past, but now I see I was wrong,” said Moreau, who is known not to look at her films except at special occasions like this event. “The past was good. The woman who stands before you was made by that past. I look at that young woman, and I recognize myself. I feel the same now as then. I’ll tell you something: Age isn’t age!”

A radiant Moreau, 70, had her hair cut short and wore a simple black velvet Yves St. Laurent sheath and some diamond accessories. Among Moreau’s many other remarks, some of them in French, was one directed at the statue looming over her on the stage. “Everybody in the world likes this big guy Oscar, and I’m just a tiny French woman looking up at him.” (An Oscar is just about the only major acting prize that has eluded Moreau--so far.)

The film clips, however, from 17 of her more than 80 pictures, suggest not only her range and mesmerizing, defining presence, but how a European actress can in fact grow older in front of the camera, continuing in major, worthy roles decade after decade whereas such continuity and status is still all but impossible for women in Hollywood.

In the clips the audience watched Moreau deliciously manage a menage-a-trois in Francois Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” (1961), the film that established her worldwide renown, and we also see her playing wise survivors of the Holocaust in two of her most recent films, Ismail Merchant’s “The Proprietor” and “I Love You, I Love You Not,” in which Claire Danes played her granddaughter.

The slightly downturned mouth that has always suggested a beguiling sensuality, the dark shining eyes, the assured carriage--these are enduring characteristics that Moreau has brought to every role she has ever played.

The film that established her image firmly--and incidentally launched director Louis Malle’s career--is “Elevator to the Scaffold” (1958). In the clip we see her wondering why her lover is late for a rendezvous in a Paris bar. She takes to pacing the street, and Malle’s widow, Candice Bergen, remarked that her husband called that pacing “Jeanne’s existential walk”--and that Michelangelo Antonioni was so taken with it that he used it when he cast her opposite Marcello Mastroianni in “La Notte” (1960). “La Notte” was represented at the tribute by its final sequence in which as dawn breaks a burned-out couple struggle to rekindle their passion.

There were glimpses of Moreau as a dance hall girl in Malle’s comedy western “Viva Maria” (965); as a bored servant accommodating her shoe fetishist employer in Bun~uel’s sly “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964); as a prostitute beguiling Stanley Baker in Joseph Losey’s “Eve” (1962); as the recently released prisoner given a decent meal by Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Bertrand Blier’s “Going Places” (1974); as a compulsive gambler in Jacques Demy’s “Bay of Angels” (1963); as the devoted Doll Tearsheet to Orson Welles’ Falstaff in his “Chimes at Midnight” (1965); and as shameless, defiant older women in the comedies “The Old Lady Who Wades in the Sea” (1991) and “The Summer House” (1992).

A number of these pictures will be screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a four-week Moreau retrospective beginning Sunday at 7 p.m. with “Bay of Angels” with Moreau present. As president of Equinoxe, an international screenwriting workshop, Moreau will also participate in its Equinoxe Weekend starting today.

Moreau’s work as a director was represented by the touching “L’Adolescente” (1978), a 1983 documentary with Lillian Gish and her latest venture, a music video, “Mama,” celebrating several generations of black women.

As part of the tribute, Stone did a brief interview with Moreau, who spoke of the hardships she and her French father and English mother endured the during the Occupation, living in Montmartre, where everything she recalled was “money and sex”--and where she resolved that she would never submit.

Producer Mike Medavoy, once Moreau’s agent, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s Jack Valenti and Ismail Merchant all spoke with respect and affection for Moreau, but perhaps the most telling remarks about her came in an eloquent letter sent by director Mike Nichols.

He wrote of the “mystery of the truth that she offers . . . and the reverence for life which she embodies.” He cited her mastery of those small, inexplicable things an actor does that enables audiences to say, “I know this person--I am that person.’ ”