NICOLE STÉPHANE

Nicole de Rothschild (Nicole Stéphane), actress and film producer: born Paris 27 May 1923; died Paris 14 March 2007.

Nicole Stéphane delivered a remarkable performance in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1950 adaptation of Jean Cocteau's celebrated novel Les Enfants Terribles. It was only her second film, but she could not have been better cast.

Though her film career was surprisingly short, curtailed in part because of a serious car accident, she later became a producer of both documentaries and fiction, including Un Amour de Swann (Swann in Love, 1984), an adaptation of the first part of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu - her unrealised ambition was to produce a film of the entire novel.

A member of the banking family, she was born Nicole de Rothschild in Paris in 1923. During the Second World War, she tried to cross the Pyrenees in an attempt to join the Free French Army, but was captured and imprisoned in Spain. After the war, she took the name Nicole Stéphane and attended acting school, where she was spotted by Jean-Pierre Melville and given a leading role in his first feature film, Le Silence de la mer (1947).

In this austere parable set during the occupation of France, a German officer is forcibly billeted at the home of a French farmer and his niece (Stéphane), who swears never to speak to him but simply listen in silence. With her role almost completely silent, the film relied heavily on looks and gestures.

Le Silence de la mer was an acknowledged influence on Robert Bresson, and another of its admirers was Cocteau, who commissioned Melville to direct Les Enfants Terribles. At first Cocteau objected to Melville's choice of Stéphane as the sister, Elisabeth, but soon became as enthusiastic about the actress as Melville.

Stéphane is superb, commanding, forceful, chillingly manipulative as her intense attachment to her brother takes on darker elements that can only lead to tragedy. Cocteau was present during most of the shooting and would have dinner with the cast in the evenings.

In 2003, the 40th anniversary of Cocteau's death, Stéphane recalled a memorable day during filming when Jean Genet arrived, describing Cocteau and Genet in fits of laughter as they discussed French 19th-century theatre: "The most amazing day of my life."

Stéphane's performance earned her a BAFTA nomination in 1953.

Stéphane acted in only four more films, including Le Défroqué (1954) with Pierre Fresnay, George Franju's short Monsieur et Madame Curie (1956), and her last screen appearance as Resistance heroine Denise Bloch in Lewis Gilbert's Carve Her Name With Pride (1958).

Her début as a producer was an Oscar-nominated documentary on the Spanish Civil War, Frederic Rossif's Mourir à Madrid (To Die in Madrid, 1963). She also produced Jean-Paul Rappeneau's romantic comedy La Vie de château (1966) and Promised Lands (1974), a documentary written and directed by Susan Sontag, dealing with the Yom Kippur War. When Sontag developed cancer, Stéphane went to live in the United States for several years to be with her.

Her greatest ambition as a producer was to film Proust's epic À la recherche du temps perdu, long considered unfilmable. In 1964 she approached François Truffaut to direct. After consideration, Truffaut declined, expressing his belief that adapting Proust for cinema would be sacrilegious.

Un Amour de Swann was ultimately made 20 years later (directed by Volker Schlöndorff), with a distinguished cast including Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti and Alain Delon.