Françoise Brion on the set of the film 'Les Parisiennes' in Paris, October 1961. REPORTERS ASSOCIÉS/GAMMA-RAPHO
Tall, blonde and willowy, Françoise Brion was a muse of the New Wave genre, coming to prominence in films that, at the start of the 1960s, revolutionized French cinema. Born Françoise Alicia Rose German de Ribon on January 29, 1933, in Paris, she married actor Paul Guers and later director, screenwriter, and critic Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, one of the founders of French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, with whom she had two children. On Tuesday, December 16, those children announced that their mother had died four days earlier in Paris. Brion was 92 years old.
As early as 1957, at the age of 24, she appeared in Donnez-moi ma chance ("Give Me My Chance") by Léonide Moguy and Nathalie by Christian-Jaque, and was also seen in 1958 in Le Petit Prof (The Little Professor) by Carlo Rim. But it was in 1960 that she caught the public's eye, in quick succession, in Le Bel Age (Love is When You Make It) by Pierre Kast (with Boris Vian and his wife Ursula Kübler, Giani Esposito, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Claude Brialy), and in two films by Doniol-Valcroze: Le Cœur battant (The French Game), where Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a painter who falls in love with her, but she prefers a Chilean diplomat, and L'Eau à la bouche ("Mouth Watering"), where she plays a lady of the manor who seduces her cousin's lover, to the strains of Serge Gainsbourg's cult song, "Je t'en prie ne sois pas farouche/quand me vient l'eau à la bouche" ("Please don't be shy/when my mouth waters").
