Geneviève Page, the alluring French actress who starred in such films as Belle de Jour, El Cid and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, died Friday. She was 97.
Page died at her home in Paris, her granddaughter, actress Zoé Guillemaud, told the AFP news agency.
In a career of more than 50 years, Page appeared in other notable films including Fanfan la Tulip (1952); Foreign Intrigue (1956), opposite Robert Mitchum; The Silken Affair (1956), with David Niven; John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966); Mayerling (1968), directed by Terence Young; and Charles Vidor’s Song Without End (1960), where the director died mid-shoot and was replaced by George Cukor.
In 1967, Spanish director Luis Buñuel cast Page as Madame Anais, the owner and operator of the high-class brothel in Belle de Jour, an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel.
The film centers on Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), whose sexless marriage pushes her into prostitution — but only between the hours of 2 and 5 p.m. As a result, Page nicknames her “Belle de Jour,” roughly translated to “Beauty of the Day.”
Madame Anais is a demanding, no-nonsense woman, with a hint of attraction toward Deneuve’s character, and the film features a very brief kiss between the two. Page received a supporting actress nomination from the National Society of Film Critics for her work, and the drama won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
A year earlier, Page had a brief role in Grand Prix (1966) as the estranged wife who refuses to grant Ferrari driver Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand) a divorce.
The Italian-American medieval epic El Cid (1961) saw Page perfectly cast as the scheming Princess Urraca. Starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, the film was a huge spectacle, running more than three hours with an overture and intermission and costing $6 million to make. “A Great Adventure, A Great Love Story, Great Stars,” the trailer proclaimed.
At the start of the 1970s, director Billy Wilder released The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Stephens as the famed detective and Colin Blakely portraying Dr. Watson. Page plays a mysterious Belgian client who asks Holmes to find her missing engineer husband.
Production of the film was halted after a 30-foot Loch Ness Monster model, built for a key sequence in the film, sank in the lake while being towed behind a boat.
“We lost our Loch Ness monster, but he [Wilder] didn’t seem to worry too much, even though he’s the producer as well as the director,” Page told The New York Times in 1969. “He was more concerned to go over and comfort the man who had made it and who was upset about its disappearing.”
The giant prop was discovered 47 years later, during a sonar survey, lying on the seabed.
She was born Geneviève Bonjean in Paris on Dec. 13, 1927. Her father, Jacques Paul Bonjean, was an art dealer and collector who opened a gallery in partnership with Christian Dior.
One of her earliest screen appearances came in the French adventure Fanfan la Tulip, which starred Gina Lollobrigida and, as the title character, Gerard Philipe. In the film, Page is rescued from a group of bandits by the swashbuckling, roguish army recruit Fanfan and offers him a tulip as thanks.
Her film résumé also included the black comedy Buffet Froid (1979), Claude Miller’s Deadly Circuit (1983) and Robert Altman‘s Beyond Therapy (1987).
Page also was a distinguished stage actress, appearing in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in 1980 and receiving the Moliere Award in 1996 for Colombe.
She was married to businessman Jean-Claude Bujard from 1959 until his death in 2011.