Forty years after her death, Romy Schneider (23 September 1938 – 29 May 1982) is still just as well-liked and popular. The European actress started her career in Germany aged 15 and then continued in France, becoming a star through films that have forever marked the history of cinema, alongside Alain Cavalier, Claude Sautet, Luchino Visconti, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger and more.
This exhibition is the first at La Cinémathèque Française to be dedicated to an actress, and will also show how Romy Schneider’s career wrote a page in the history of cinema at this time and in the history of the great filmmakers around the world, whether French, American, Italian, German or Austrian. She was constantly searching for the absolute, which doubtlessly contributed to her genius and grace.
The exhibition will be an opportunity for her to speak for herself. We can try to bring her back to life through her roles, but also through her texts, interviews, diary and behind-the-scenes documentaries where we see her as ever vibrant and joyful, truly happy to be doing her job.
With such a glamourous life of abrupt reinventions and life-changing encounters, this exhibition will seek to understand how she became this icon of a modern woman, who, forty years after her death, still gets people’s hearts racing, and whose image has not aged one bit.
