Screen and stage were not equal suitors for the affections of the French actor Geneviève Page, who once described working in cinema as a case of coitus interruptus. “You start a scene, you rehearse it, you’re ready. Then they do the sound and lighting. There comes a moment when you’ve got to charge in. And then: ‘Cut!’ It annoyed me each time,” Page told France Culture in 2009. “Whereas when you arrive in your theatre dressing room in the evening, you know it’ll start soon and you’ll see it through right to the end.”
Page, who has died aged 97, built a heavyweight theatre portfolio over more than five decades; she played roles such as Hermione in Euripides’s Andromache, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and the Fassbinder heroine Petra von Kant. But her film career had a stuttering rhythm, with the French industry never truly finding a place for her. Her melodramatic ardour and throaty timbre were not a natural fit in demure starlet roles; with her long neck and upwardly canted nose, her beauty had a certain haughtiness.
