The British actress Jean Simmons died from lung cancer yesterday, aged 80. She appeared in more than 70 films, among them Désirée in 1954, where she had the lead role as Désirée Clary, the merchant’s daughter from Marseilles who was engaged to the young General Napoléon Bonaparte and through her marriage to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte became Queen of Norway and Sweden.The film was based on Annemarie Selinko’s bestselling novel from 1951, which brought Queen Désirée great international fame. But, like NRK’s much-discussed recent Harry & Charles, this was one of those historical films where only the main events are facts and everything else fiction. Elderly ladies in particular seem to believe that what happened in the film was what happened to Désirée in real life, but this is far from true: she did become engaged to Napoléon, she did marry Bernadotte and she did become Queen of Sweden and Norway, but in real life nothing of it happened in the way it happens in the film.
Désirée was anyway not one of Simmons’s greatest roles and in The Guardian Philip French writes more about the life of this British actress:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/the-unforgettable-jean-simmons
Dear Trond, watching this film this Easter was a strange experience. Noone but Marlon Brando does a descent work, he is is mesmerizing. I saw if after the five hour long "Napoleon" with Christian Clavier.... True or not, Brando was high above almost anything. It is said that he did not take his role seriously at all, but compared to Michael Rennie´s JB Bernadotte, Merle Oberon´s Joséphine....
ReplyDeleteI found this in some American obituary:
- While playing the title character in "Desiree", the mistress [SIC] of Brando's Napoleon, she was so in awe of the actor that "I was sort of forgetting what I was supposed to do," quoted from an interview in the Union-Tribune, 1990. I really think so, yes...
Keep up your good work with the blog. Thanks to you I start to read Gabriel Girod de ´Ain "Désirée Bernadotte".
:)
AnitaK, Norway
Yes, it is a very odd film. And the only things which happen in the film which really happened, were that Désirée was engaged to Napoléon, that she married Bernadotte and that she became Crown Princess of Sweden. Everything else is fiction, and nothing of this happened in the way it is portrayed in the film. But obviously many think they know everything about Queen Desideria because they have seen the film decades ago - such is the power of film.
DeleteDear Trond, watching this film this Easter was a strange experience. Noone but Marlon Brando does a descent work, he is is mesmerizing. I saw if after the five hour long "Napoleon" with Christian Clavier.... True or not, Brando was high above almost anything. It is said that he did not take his role seriously at all, but compared to Michael Rennie´s JB Bernadotte, Merle Oberon´s Joséphine....
ReplyDeleteI found this in some American obituary:
- While playing the title character in "Desiree", the mistress [SIC] of Brando's Napoleon, she was so in awe of the actor that "I was sort of forgetting what I was supposed to do," quoted from an interview in the Union-Tribune, 1990. I really think so, yes...
Keep up your good work with the blog. Thanks to you I start to read Gabriel Girod de ´Ain "Désirée Bernadotte".
:)
AnitaK, Norway