French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, offered by Les carbones Korès, no. 189. Photo: Lucienne Chevert.
French postcard by Edition du Globe, Paris, no. 137. Photo: Lucienne Chevert.
French postcard by Editions du Globe, Paris, no. 667. Photo: Sam Lévin.
Belgian collector card by Merbotex, Brussels, for Cinema Palace, Izegem, no. 47. Photo: Sam Lévin.
The great revelation of the year
Anne Vernon was born Édith Antoinette Alexandrine Vignaud in 1924 in Saint-Denis, a working-class Paris suburb. Her father, Georges Vernon, was an executive, while her mother, Raymonde, was a seamstress. Édith had a three-and-a-half-year-old older sister, Georgia. Édith attended the Lycée Lamartine in Paris's 9th arrondissement. When she was 14, the family moved to Enghien-les-Bains, which had a higher social status. Convinced of her aptitude for fashion design, the teenager wanted to enrol at the Ecole des Arts Appliqués à l'Industrie in Paris. Her parents approved of this ambition. Edith turned 16 during the Occupation. Independent, she moved to Paris, renting a small flat on Place du Tertre with a friend. She frequented the artists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and made progress in advertising design and sketching children's dresses.
Her brother-in-law introduced her to the famous couturier Marcel Rochas. She presented him with a design for a bottle for his new perfume, Echec. Rochas liked her. He had created a film department, and assigned Edith to it. She met Madeleine Sologne at a costume fitting for L'éternel retour. The film's producer, André Paulvé, offered her a screen test, for which Marcel Achard gave her a text. She then met Jean Cocteau, who encouraged her to enrol in Tania Balachova's drama classes. Balachova struggled with the premiere of Jean-Paul Sartre's ‘Huis Clos’ at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. Short of an understudy for his play, director Louis Ducreux suggested that Edith take her first step into the theatre. Scared, Edith hesitated but, convinced of the good health of Gaby Sylvia, the lead character, finally accepted. However, Gaby Sylvia fell ill and Edith played the role for four months. Shortly afterwards, the Vieux-Colombier staged André Roussin's play ‘Jean-Baptiste, le mal aimé’ (1944), in which the lead role was also given to Gaby Sylvia. Once again, she had a relapse and Roussin saw only one replacement to take over the role. Edith turned out to be a perfect Armande Béjart opposite André Roussin in Molière's clothes.
In 1946, Fernand Ledoux at the Comédie Française invited the young actress to join his troupe for a year-long tour of South America (1946). The programme included venues in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago de Chile. Jean Anouilh soon hired her for his new play ‘L'invitation au château’. Pierre de Hérain, son-in-law of Marshal Pétain, hired Edith for a small role in the crime comedy Le mannequin assassin/The Murdered Model (Pierre de Hérain,1947), It was her film debut. From then on, Edith alternated between theatre and film. British director Donald B. Wilson hired her for a film he was preparing to shoot at Pinewood Studios, the romantic comedy Warning to Wantons (Donald Wilson 1948). The name Edith Vignaud was too difficult to pronounce in Great Britain, so her name became Anne Vernon. The choice was made based on the responses to the competition organised for this purpose. Warning to Wantons, the first film to use the ‘Independent Frame’ television technique on a film set, was a severe financial flop.
At the end of her career, Anne Vernon’s filmography included 40 titles. In great demand, she made films in France, England, Italy, the United States, Germany, Austria and Spain. After her English film, Emile-Edwin Reinert offered her the female lead in Ainsi finit la nuit/Thus Finishes the Night (Emil E. Reinert, 1949). L'Ecran français declared her the great revelation of the year. She played the wife of a public prosecutor (Henri Guisol) who falls in love with one of his former school friends (Claude Dauphin), a passion that is intended to have no future. Vernon herself also immediately fell in love with Dauphin who was married to Rosine Deréan. He did not want to hurt his wife who was still scarred by her internment in the Ravensbrück camp. Shortly afterwards, Anne met Robert Badinter, a young lawyer and future Minister of Justice during François Mitterrand's first seven-year term in office. They married in 1957 but divorced eight years later, though they remained the best of friends. Also with Reinert, Anne Vernon appeared in the Paris episode of the anthology film A Tale of Five Cities (Romolo Marcellini, Emil E. Reinert, Wolfgang Staudte, Montgomery Tully, Géza von Cziffra, 1949).
In 1950, after Ralph Habib had directed her in the detective film Rue des saussaies, she finally got her breakthrough in Jacques Becker’s wonderful romance Edouard et Caroline (Jacques Becker, 1950) opposite Daniel Gélin. Two years later, the actress reunited with her director for Rue de l'Estrapade/Françoise Steps Out (Jacques Becker, 1953), a little street in the Latin Quarter near the Panthéon, where, as the deceived wife of the very seductive Louis Jourdan, she valiantly resists the advances of the same Daniel Gélin, a young bohemian musician. Now recognised and acclaimed by the public, she followed this up in London with Time Bomb (Ted Tetzlaff, 1952), as the wife of an American engineer played by Glenn Ford. Capable of tense dramatic roles as well, she made only one Hollywood film during her career, playing the second femme lead in the Film Noir Shakedown (Joseph Pevney, 1950) with Howard Duff and Peggy Dow.
French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 859. Photo: Studio Bernard et Vauclair.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. D 276. Photo: Grand National Pictures. Anne Vernon in A Tale of Five Cities (Emil E. Reinert, a.o., 1951).
Yugoslavian postcard by Sedma Sila. Photo: Morava Film, Beograd (Belgrade).
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 53/1, 1956. Photo: DEFA / Neufeld. Anne Vernon in Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Eugen York, 1955).
Praise from both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard
Back in Paris, Anne Vernon embarked on a rather eventful honeymoon with François Périer in Jeunes mariés/Newlyweds (Gilles Grangier, 1953). She crossed the Channel again to play in The Love Lottery (Charles Crichton, 1953), with David Niven. She also discovered the pleasant countryside around Lake Como and acquired one of her best souvenirs. In Bel ami (Louis Daquin, 1954), freely adapted from the short story by Guy de Maupassant, she is one of the victims of the impudent Jean Danet, who played the title role.
Other films include the historical crime drama L'affaire des poisons/The Poison Affair (Henri Decoin, 1955), in which she played the innocent but manipulated next-in-line to the Marquise de Montespan (Danielle Darrieux), the Italian film La donna più bella del mondo/Beautiful But Dangerous (Robert Z. Leonard, 1955), the romanticised story of singer Lina Cavalieri played by Gina Lollobrigida; Le long des trottoirs/The Width of the Pavement (Léonide Moguy, 1956) about a social worker, who tries to rescue Danik Patisson from prostitution, and Les lavandières du Portugal/The Washerwomen of Portugal (Pierre Gaspard-Huit, Ramón Torrado, 1957). In Il generale Della Rovere/General Dell Rovere (Roberto Rossellini, 1959), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, she begs for help from the superb forger Vittorio De Sica, Her small role earned her praise from both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
In 1963, Anne Vernon appeared as Catherine Deneuve’s mother in Les parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1963). Jacques Demy, who had noticed and appreciated her in Becker's films, offered Anne Vernon the singing role (dubbed by Christiane Legrand, composer Michel Legrand's sister) of the owner of the umbrella shop she runs with her daughter, Catherine Deneuve. A director with an elegant and precise style, Demy demonstrates in this musical an art of mise-en-scène brought to perfection. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and became a hit with audiences. Vernon followed this up with Marcel Achard's Patate/Friend of the Family (Robert Thomas, 1964), in which she reunited with Danielle Darrieux and Jean Marais.
René Gainville, who had recently become her second husband, directed her in the crime films L'homme de Mykonos/The Man from Mykonos (René Gainville, 1965) with Gabriele Tinti and Le démoniaque/The Woman Is a Stranger (René Gainville,1966). The latter film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase by Jean-Louis Curtis, cast her as the mother-in-law of a neuropathic murderer. Hadley Chase later said that this was the only film adaptation of his work of which he felt proud. She spent two days on the set of Radley Metzger's lesbian soft-core Therese and Isabelle (Radley Metzger, 1967), based on the novel by Violette Leduc. This was Anne Vernon's final film appearance. She made several notable appearances in the theatre, including in ‘Tartuffe’ by Molière. In 1971, she embarked on a tour of French-speaking countries with ‘Quatre pièces sur jardin’, a lively comedy written by Barillet and Grédy, in which she played four roles. After her theatrical career stopped, Vernon’s relationship with René Gainville also came to an end.
In 1972, she made a final appearance on television in a long-forgotten mini-series, Pont dormant (Fernand Marzelle, 1972). Edith Vignaud returned to her great passion, painting. Jean-Marie Drot, a television director and producer, was one of the first to encourage her to exhibit, which she did with great success in Paris, Saint-Tropez and New York. She signed her works with 3 mysterious letters, FMR (to be read phonetically). In 1988, she remarried Jean-Pierre Prouteau, Secretary of State for Small and Medium-sized Industry under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He had been her partner for several years. He died in autumn 1998. Yvan Foucart at L’encinémathèque: "Although she declares that she never had the ‘sacred fire’ to succeed in the cinema, she is certain that she could not do without painting. She has no worries about being away from the stage, even if she is surprised and delighted by the interest she arouses among film fans, as shown by the volume of mail she continues to receive." After the death of Micheline Presle in 2024, Anne Vernon is now the Doyenne of the French cinema.
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 389, 1957. Photo: Peter Steffen.
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 2434, 1965.
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 2720, 1966.
Italian card by Cineteca Bologna to promote Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. Photo: Anne Vernon, Catherine Deneuve and Harald Wolff in Les parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1963).
Sources: Sources: Yvan Foucart (Les Gens du Cinéma – French), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia (English, German and French), and IMDb.
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