Sylvia Bataille

Origins and early life

Sylvia Bataille was born Sylvia Maklès in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris on 1 November 1908, into an Ashkenazi family of Romanian origin; her mother, born Cohen, was proud of her yiddishkeit while keeping her distance from religious practice.

Work and career

She trained with Charles Dullin and joined the Groupe Octobre, the theatre troupe around Jacques Prévert, before Jean Renoir gave her two of the parts by which the French cinema of the 1930s is remembered: the shopgirl Estelle in Le Crime de monsieur Lange and, above all, Henriette in Partie de campagne, both shot in 1936. After the first Statute on Jews of October 1940 she fled Paris with her daughter for the unoccupied zone.

In 1942 she was obliged to register as a Jew at Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Jacques Lacan went to the police station and took the file back, an act that in all likelihood kept her from deportation. She was married to the writer Georges Bataille from 1928, and married Lacan in 1953; she withdrew from the screen after the war and lived the rest of her life away from it, dying in Paris on 22 December 1993.