“A beautiful eulogy and a much-needed corrective” (The New York Times)—a love letter to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris—only to live the rest of her life plagued by scandal, as told from the perspective of her adoring younger cousin.
The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later.
To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny.
Unsentimental and moving, My Cousin Maria Schneider is a love letter to a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and a powerful story of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.
Vanessa Schneideris a French journalist and novelist. She lives in Paris, where she works at the prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde. For over ten years, she has written award-winning essays and novels that have been translated abroad. My Cousin Maria Schneider is her eighth book, and her first to be translated into English.
Molly Ringwald’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Vogue, and she is the author of the bestselling novel-in-stories When It Happens to You. She previously translated Lie with Me, a novel by Philippe Besson.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1 “I had a beautiful life,” you say with a tired smile. It’s a few days before your death and you’re lost in happy memories. Your voice is soft, like a finger gliding along a piece of velvet. You don’t say it to make us happy, or to convince yourself—that isn’t your way.
At first, I don’t understand. Your declaration seems like a dissonant note in an otherwise harmonic chord. For so long now I’ve been worrying about you—years of my life spent living through your pain and misfortune until it became nearly indistinguishable from my own. And yet, here we are.
“I had a beautiful life.”
I’m so glad you see it this way.
You are fifty-eight years old when you die. Far too young—and yet we never thought you would make it even that long. Most people assumed that you had died years ago. To them, you’re already a figure from the distant past.
After your death, the media thrusts you back into the spotlight. The articles all tell the same story, more or less, cobbled together from the same hackneyed clichés: “Erotic Actress” and “Lost Child of the Cinema.” They write about The Last Tango in Paris and of your “ruined career” and “tragic destiny.” There’s the hedonism of the seventies, the cruelty of the film business and, of course, the sex and drugs.
No one writes about how, when you die, you are sipping champagne, your favorite drink—the one that could make you forget your childhood and help fill in the cracks of a fractured, sensitive soul. You leave us amidst bubbles and bursts of laughter, loving faces and smiles—–upright with your head held high, a little tipsy. With panache.
