Michèle Mercier

Jocelyne Yvonne Mercier was born in Nice on the first day of 1939.

The daughter of a French pharmacist and an Italian mother, her early path seemed far from the spotlight and the period wigs. She preferred the discipline of classical ballet and the sweat of daily rehearsals. At seventeen she left for Paris to dance with Roland Petit's company, but film crossed her path by chance.

She changed her name to Michèle in honor of her late sister and as a subtle tribute to Michèle Morgan. She debuted in 1957 with Retour de manivelle and soon found herself shooting in Italy and the United Kingdom.

The industry never forgave her for being too beautiful to be taken seriously.

During those early years, she worked under François Truffaut in Shoot the Piano Player. But her life changed dramatically when she accepted a role that other stars of the era had turned down for fear of being typecast.

The contract that became a curse

Brigitte Bardot didn't want the role. Catherine Deneuve was too young, and Jane Fonda spoke French with too strong an accent. So producer Raymond Borderie settled on Mercier to bring to life the heroine of Anne and Serge Golon's novels.

In 1964, Angélique, marquise des anges was released, and its success was so massive that it derailed her career. She shot five films in the series in just four years. Audiences adored her, but the directors of the French New Wave stopped calling her because her face was irrevocably tied to the corsets and court intrigues of Louis XIV.

And the gamble paid off.

She was paid 45,000 francs for the first installment, a laughable sum compared with the millions the franchise earned worldwide. While her image adorned folders and walls, she felt trapped in a character that kept her from roles with greater dramatic weight.

She tried to break the mold in 1963 with I tre volti della paura, directed by Mario Bava. In this horror film she showed she could sustain tension without endless necklines, but the marquise's shadow was simply too long.

Financial Ruin and a Retreat into Obscurity

Her private life was as turbulent as her characters' lives. She married four times, and none of those unions brought the stability she was looking for. Her first husband suffered from serious mental illness, and the second disappeared with much of her personal fortune.

The money vanished in lawyers' fees and painful divorces.

In the late 1960s she tried her luck in Hollywood. She appeared in You Can't Win 'Em All alongside Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson in 1970, but the film went unnoticed and she decided to return to Europe. The French film industry had already turned its back on her, and she was forced to take supporting roles in low-budget Italian productions.

In 1999, she fell victim to a financial scam that left her on the brink of complete bankruptcy. She had to sell her silk gowns and some of her personal jewelry to pay the debts piled up by a business partner she had fully trusted.

In 2010 she received a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival and was named a Chevalier of Arts and Letters in France. Three years later, in 2013, she published her memoir Je ne suis pas Angélique, an effort to reclaim her own identity after decades of media misunderstandings.

Her salary for the last installment of the saga in 1968 was 50,000 francs.