RIP Maria Schneider who has died aged 58 - discovered by Bertolucci for LAST TANGO IN PARIS which she felt exploited her, her best role remains 'the girl' in Antonioni's mesmerising THE PASSENGER where she is ideal as the modern free-wheeling girl who treks around Europe and North Africa with Jack's disillusioned journalist. It is a shame her life was not happier.
Today's "Times" and "Telegraph" in the UK have sympathetic obituaries on her - wouldn't you know it: she got just a pittance for LAST TANGO whereas Brando and Bertolucci made fortunes. But she was quite sanguine in quoted interviews, advising young actors "to learn another job to do" during lean times and young actresses, if they persist in the movie business "not to take their clothes off for middle-aged men who tell them it is art". Thus speaks the voice of experience... though that '70s era of experimentation is over now and cinema now is mainly entertainment as Donald Sutherland said recently).
I've never seen "Last Tango", nor do I really have much desire to, but "The Passenger" is a great, mysterious film that always sucks me in, I love it. Schneider was just right in it. Its too bad she had such a bitter taste left from her experience with "Tango".
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