FilmObituary

Nicole Stéphane

Renowned for her acting debut, she later struggled to bring Proust to the screen

Despite having appeared in several films, and subsequently becoming an enterprising producer, Nicole Stéphane, who has died aged 83, will always be associated with the role of Elisabeth, the semi-incestuous sister, in Jean-Pierre Melville's adaptation of the Jean Cocteau novel, Les Enfants Terribles (also known as The Strange Ones, 1950).

Stéphane as the passionate Elisabeth who, in Cocteau's words, is "all fire and ice, she despised everything lukewarm", is hypnotic as the manipulative elder sister of Paul (Edouard Dermithe) with whom she creates a private enclosed world in their untidy shared single room. Although, at the time, when portraying the blond siblings in their late teens, Stéphane was 26 and Dermithe 24, she was more convincing than he at being a wilful child and the role brought her a Bafta nomination.

Yet, despite his deficiencies, which she more than makes up for, they balance each other - "two limbs of the same body" - her masculinity and his femininity making an androgynous whole. She has a certain butch glamour as she elegantly walks around the apartment in a Dior negligee with a clothes peg on her nose "to give me a Greek profile", while at other moments, her clear and troubled eyes stare from a face without makeup giving her a tragic air. "The smallest gesture of Nicole Stéphane has the frightening power of those of Electra," claimed Cocteau.

He had initially resisted her being cast on Melville's insistence, while Dermithe, Cocteau's adopted son, was imposed on Melville. It was Melville who discovered Stéphane at an acting school, and immediately got her to play in his first film, Le Silence de la Mer (Silence of the Sea, 1947), adapted from the 1942 novel by Vercors (the nom de guerre of Jean Bruller). In this parable of the resistance, Stéphane plays the niece of an old French farmer who is obliged to give lodgings to a German officer during the occupation. The fact that uncle and niece have sworn never to speak to the invader but listen in silence as the German pours out his ideas, meant that she could only express herself with her limpid eyes, until, at his departure, she murmurs one word: "Adieu".

Born Nicole de Rothschild, part of the banking family, she was imprisoned in Spain in 1942 after crossing the Pyrenees while she was trying to join the Free French. Finally, she was able to join the French Liberation Army in London. After liberation, she decided to take up acting as a career, assuming the name of Nicole Stéphane. Apart from the two Melville films, she appeared in Born of Unknown Father (1950), The Defrocked One (1954), and as the female lead and narrator in George Franju's short Monsieur and Madame Curie (1956). Her last film role was as Denise Bloch, the Jewish resistance worker who died in a concentration camp in Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), which starred Virgina McKenna as Violette Szabo.

After a bad car accident, she decided to give up acting and become a producer of films with an ideological basis. She kicked off successfully with Frédéric Rossif's Oscar-nominated compilation film To Die in Madrid (1962) about the Spanish civil war, with English commentary supplied by John Gielgud and Irene Worth for the British and American releases.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau's debut film, La Vie de Château (1965), set during the occupation, was a comedy with serious intent. In 1969, she bravely produced her friend Marguerite Duras' first solo directorial effort, Destroy, She Said, a typically elliptical piece, which consists of 60 shots, alternating between static ones and close-ups.

Another friend, and sometime lover, was Susan Sontag, with whom Stéphane made Promised Lands (1974), a film essay shot during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when the two women set off into the Sinai desert with a small crew while burned-out tanks were still smouldering and corpses lay by the side of the road. When Sontag - who lived in an apartment over Stéphane's garage when she came to Paris - had her first battle with cancer two years later, Stéphane found the doctor who saved her. They worked together again much later on the documentary Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo (1993), which followed Sontag's efforts to direct Beckett's play during the long siege of the city.

But what occupied Stéphane most over the last decades was her attempt to get Proust's novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, for which she had held the screen rights since 1962, made into a film. The involved history of the yet-to-be-realised film (only parts of the epic novel have been made into features), needs a long book in itself. Suffice it to say that her approaches to François Truffaut ("I wrote to the woman producer that no real film-maker would allow himself to squeeze the madeleine as though it were a lemon"), Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette came to nothing. So did the Joseph Losey project, with a script by Harold Pinter. The closest it came to fruition was with Luchino Visconti. After an initial meeting with the most Proustian of directors, Stéphane cried, "You said everything I wanted to hear! I must kiss you!" before giving him permission to direct it with her producing.

Eight months was spent writing the script (363 pages long), and another six weeks scouting for locations. La Ferriere, the belle-époque château belonging to Guy de Rothschild, was selected, thanks to Stéphane's connections, along with many other sites. In all the film was to last four hours and cost an astronomical 5bn lire, but when Stéphane baulked at the price and asked to be given more time to raise the money, Visconti, haughtily and discourteously abandoned the film. Sadly, Stéphane, who was a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur et Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, never lived to see her dream realised.

· Nicole Stéphane, actor, producer, director, born May 27 1923; died March 14 2007

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