LONDON, 20 September 2003 — One of the paradoxes of Leslie Caron’s career is that her most famous roles were the earliest ones, made when she had scant experience of acting. She is still defined in the public’s eyes by Gigi and An American In Paris. Regardless of what she has done since, whether it’s writing fiction (like her 1982 collection Vengeance) or playing George Sands on stage (as she did in the mid-nineties), or taking a part as a downtrodden single mother in the British kitchen-sink drama The L-Shaped Room, people invariably expect a grinning, top hatted Maurice Chevalier to pop up at her shoulder and start crooning out lasciviously “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”.
The roles that do come her way these days are rarely as substantial as one would expect for an actress of her status. She isn’t, for instance, treated in especially flattering fashion in Merchant-Ivory’s new film, Le Divorce. She plays the severe Madame Suzanne Persand, a frosty, sour-faced matriarch. Preoccupied with keeping up appearances, Mme Persand does little to help her American daughter-in-law (Naomi Watts) when her marriage threatens to break up. (She is, as Caron puts it, the kind of mother-in-law who would react to a suicide in the family by saying “that’s in very bad taste”.) The filmmakers even manage to make Caron look frumpish and Lady Bracknell-like, a perverse achievement given that the 72-year-old actress is elegant and glamorous in person.
In truth, Mme Persand is only a minor character in Le Divorce, but Caron still gamely joined the publicity bandwagon that traveled from Venice to Deauville earlier this month in a bid to drum up interest in the movie. There is, she acknowledges, something curiously detached about the way that the French and American families alike regard the separation in Le Divorce, despite the tragic events it provokes. Caron, whose second marriage (to the theater director Peter Hall) ended in a highly public divorce in 1966, with Warren Beatty as a co-respondent, doesn’t see much humor in the subject. “It (divorce) is one of the worst experiences. It’s an admittance of failure,” she says. Nonetheless, the snobbery and the highly coded language of the upper-class French family depicted in the film were something familiar to her from her own upbringing.
Born in 1931, Caron was the daughter of a wealthy French pharmacist (Jean-Claude Caron) and his American-born wife, Margaret Petit, a Broadway dancer. Her father’s well-to-do family “looked down” on her mother. “My mother was beach-blonde. She had been a ballet dancer. She was a divorcee and she was a bit older than my father. I tell you, there was a lot of prejudice.” Caron is a movie star by default. Despite—or perhaps because of - opposition from various relatives (including a grandfather who asked her mother “Margaret - do you want your daughter to be a whore?”), she decided at the age of 11 to become a professional ballerina.
“In my grandfather’s youth, being a ballet dancer was the same as being a whore. All ballet dancers were kept woman,” Caron elaborates. “Showing your legs on the stage was a pretext to attract rich gentlemen.
And even when I was a girl, upper-class young ladies certainly wouldn’t go on the stage as actresses, let alone as ballet dancers.” She was stubborn, though, and had a natural aptitude for dance: She had good limbs; was supple, gracious and “in the right proportions”. She wanted to emulate her mother and, above all, to be admired by her. “All my mother talked about was (Anna) Pavlova and (Vaslav) Nijinsky,” she recalls.
Fifty years on, Caron still sounds vaguely regretful that she was sidetracked by cinema. She was only 18 and already a prima ballerina when she was spotted by Gene Kelly, who had seen her on stage in Paris. It was her lucky break, but it also signaled the beginning of the end of her dancing career. “I’m the one movie star who never tried to be in the movies.” It’s fitting that she should be seen now in another film about Americans in Paris. Caron has witnessed the best and worst of the city. Growing up in the Vichy years (she was eight when war was declared), she suffered a rude awakening after what had been a luxurious and pampered childhood. During the war, she was reduced to wearing shoes cobbled together from her great grandmother’s opera gloves. Like Audrey Hepburn (who grew up in occupied Netherlands) she was painfully thin. To boost their diets, the family ate horsemeat, dandelions and even seaweed. “Time was suspended,” she remembers of the war years. “Every sentence seemed to start with ‘before the war’ or ‘after the war’. To a child, it seemed an endless, dreary daily fight.” When she was starring in An American In Paris in Hollywood, Caron suffered from glandular fever as a direct consequence of the malnutrition she endured during the war.
Though she cites Gigi as her favorite among her films, it’s noticeable that she isn’t especially fulsome of figure like her co-star Maurice Chevalier (who was accused of showing sympathy for the occupiers and once performed in Nazi Germany). There was always a shadow over their names. Not that this was a subject she ever broached with Maurice Chevalier. “God, no!” she exclaims.