Nicole Stéphane

Origins and early life

Nicole Stéphane was born Nicole de Rothschild in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris on 27 May 1924, daughter of the baron James-Henri de Rothschild and of Claude Dupont.

Work and career

She said she learned at sixteen that she was Jewish, and afterwards pinned Stars of David up in her bedroom. In 1942 she crossed the Pyrenees to join the Free French, was imprisoned in Spain, eventually reached England, trained at the Free French officers' school at Ribbesford with her sister, and served as a second lieutenant, a liaison agent in Germany and a dispatch rider in London. Back in France she took a stage name and was cast by Jean-Pierre Melville as the niece in Le Silence de la mer in 1949, then by Jean-Pierre Melville again, from Cocteau's text, as Élisabeth in Les Enfants terribles in 1950, the two performances on which her acting reputation rests.

A car accident ended that career, and she became a producer: she brought out Marcel Ophüls's Le Chagrin et la Pitié, the film that forced France to look at what it had done under the Occupation, held the rights to Proust for years and had Visconti and Losey work on them, and produced documentaries on Israel. She was a chevalier of the Legion of Honour and of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and died in Paris on 14 March 2007.