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      A Conductor’s Battle With a Classical Music Gender Barrier

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      Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that profiles women leading the way on climate, politics, business and more.The baton-waving bully conductor played by Cate Blanchett in “Tár” has earned a series of Oscar nominations and captivated audiences worldwide. That may be, in part, because of her novelty: Until recently, conducting was almost exclusively a male profession.The French conductor Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime battling that gender barrier. In 2019, she co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.“Giving confidence and visibility to the talented women who are emerging as orchestral conductors is a cause La Maestra will continue to champion with commitment and passion,” said a news release inviting contestants for the next competition, in March 2024. The competition, founded with the Philharmonie de Paris, awards prizes of 5,000 to 20,000 euros ($5,300 to $21,400) to finalists who are provided numerous musical opportunities, too. Ms. Gibault also founded the Paris Mozart Orchestra in 2011, one of France’s few female-led orchestras.Born in 1945 and raised in Le Mans in northwestern France, where her father taught music theory at the conservatory, Ms. Gibault was studying violin when she discovered conducting and persuaded the conservatory to teach it.She went on to make classical music history by becoming the first woman to conduct a performance at La Scala in Milan (where she was an assistant to her mentor, the late conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then La Scala’s music director). She also was the first woman to conduct the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Ms. Gibault, 77, has been busy and much in the news lately, especially with the Academy Awards on March 12. She discussed her career, her views on “Tár” and sexism in classical music in a phone interview from Paris. The conversation was translated from French, edited and condensed.Why did you decide to set up the La Maestra competition?In 2018, I was the only female jury member of a conducting competition in Mexico. There were such sexist attitudes on the part of certain jurors that I was shocked. One man on the jury even said that women were biologically incapable of being conductors, because their arms were naturally turned outward to hold babies. Whenever a female contestant came up in the competition, this man would cover his face with his jacket, close his eyes and plug his ears. One female finalist who was very musical and very talented received as many votes as a young man to whom the jury gave the first prize. I found that very unfair.The competition in Mexico was a trigger for me. I was furious. When I got back to Paris, I met with a patron, Dominique Senequier, [founder and] president of the private investment company Ardian. I told her that a lot of female talents were invisible, and that it would be interesting to do something for them. She encouraged me to set up a prestigious competition for female conductors and said she would finance it.The International Conductors Competition La Maestra, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. The three finalists, with bouquets from left, are Beatriz Fernández Aucejo (3rd Prize, ARTE Prize), Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk (2nd Prize, French Concert Halls and Orchestras Prize, ECHO Prize) and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń (1st Prize, Generation Opera Prize).Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasWhat impact has the competition had?The impact has been extraordinary. Female conductors are now viewed as a very modern phenomenon. Yet we have to be careful and very vigilant: make sure that it’s not just the young and attractive conductors who are being recruited. There is a flagrant degree of age discrimination in the world of classical music. For that to change, we need more women in management positions.What was your own experience as a young female conductor in a profession with almost no women?Audiences took it very well. The problem was the condescension of colleagues — of certain male conductors and of the male managers and directors of orchestras and cultural institutions. For them it was fine to hire women as long as they were assistant conductors, especially if they were very good assistants. I worked on pieces that the men didn’t want to work on, such as new compositions. I knew that this was a battle I had to wage with a smile, never complaining, never whining. That’s the way it worked.Why did you set up the Paris Mozart Orchestra?In my career, I experienced aggressive behavior on the part of musicians who made my job very hard, orchestras that didn’t want to play at my tempo. It was sometimes very difficult. I wanted to be able to choose the program. And I didn’t want to wait to be chosen.What did you think of the movie “Tár”?I found it disturbing, yet fascinating. What I like about the movie is that it’s a fable about power: how power can transform human beings, be they men or women. It’s like a Greek tragedy.Ms. Gibault co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasDid you feel that it was about you?I don’t think we should be egocentric about it. It’s not because I’m a woman conductor that I felt directly concerned. It’s true that when you’re fighting for the cause of female conductors, it’s disturbing to see a woman who accumulates so many reasons to be hated: who takes advantage of her power, who takes drugs, who flirts with the young women in the orchestra. Of course, if a man behaved in that way, it would be a lot less shocking because we’re used to it.That kind of male behavior in classical music is now being called out. I think it’s high time for that behavior to stop. Not only is there abuse of power and sexual misconduct, but male conductors are also overpaid. That’s unacceptable given the economic crisis that the world of culture is going through.You mean the pay gap between male and female orchestra conductors?Yes, but also the pay gap with the musicians in the orchestra. And this incredible disdain that some male conductors have for the musicians that they’re conducting. We need to revolutionize this world from the inside. We need a different set of values.What do you need to revolutionize?The economics of culture. And the fact that careers are being built on notoriety, so the focus is on boosting people’s fame. There are people who are very famous and who are extraordinary artists, and others who are a little less so. I know extraordinary artists who are not famous at all.So there’s a cult of personality?Yes — for purely economic reasons. More

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      How BMG Secretly Signed a Rapper Dropped for Antisemitic Lyrics

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      In 2021, the global music company BMG was looking for a hit in France’s growing hip-hop market when its executives came up with a strategy: They would sign Freeze Corleone, a rising rapper on the Parisian scene with an aura of mystique, a hit album and more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify.There was one problem. Freeze Corleone had been widely condemned in Europe for antisemitic lyrics. “I arrive determined like Adolf in the 1930s,” he rapped in French in one 2018 song, and, in another, “Everything for the family, so that my children live like Jewish rentiers,” a word often associated with landlords. Other tracks have included conspiracy theories about 9/11 and a shout-out to “the Aryans.”Just a year before BMG’s deal with him, Freeze Corleone had been dropped by his previous label, the French arm of the giant Universal Music, which said that his music “amplified unacceptable racist statements.”“In order to mitigate the risk of possible controversy,” BMG executives wrote in a memo, they had a workaround. The contract with Freeze Corleone stipulated that the label had the right to approve his lyrics and that it would keep BMG’s involvement with his career hidden, according to documents and internal emails reviewed by The New York Times.“No BMG logo anywhere on the release,” Dominique Casimir, one of the company’s most senior executives, emailed to a company lawyer and other executives.She also demanded there would be no announcement heralding the deal. “No signing picture,” Ms. Casimir wrote. “Sorry to be this strict.”A few weeks later, in October 2021, BMG signed a one-album deal with Freeze Corleone worth more than one million euros, or about $1.1 million.In the end, BMG didn’t put out the album. In a recent interview, Ms. Casimir said that she had decided to cancel the deal the day before the release of its first single.But the story of BMG and Freeze Corleone raises questions about why BMG executives had signed him in the first place while going to great lengths to conceal the relationship. And it offers an object lesson in the temptations and risks corporations face when they seek to capitalize on the notoriety of pop-culture figures. That tension played out on a bigger stage last year when, amid a rising tide of antisemitism, Adidas ended its lucrative partnership with Kanye West after he made antisemitic comments.In the interview, Ms. Casimir spoke about the challenges of monitoring a large pipeline of content at a multinational company; said that the decision to omit BMG’s name from the album had been made mutually with the artist; and described BMG’s ultimate decision to scrap its deal with Freeze Corleone as a sign that its content moderation policies had worked.“People make mistakes,” she said. “We caught the mistake. And whatever the outcome of that mistake is, we have to deal with that.”A Fraught HistoryThis was not the first time that BMG, and Ms. Casimir, had to scramble to minimize damage over antisemitic lyrics.In 2018, the company was at the center of a media firestorm over an album it had released the year before, “Jung Brutal Gutaussehend 3” (“Young Brutal Good-Looking 3”), by a pair of German rappers, Kollegah and Farid Bang. Despite lyrics like “My body is more defined than Auschwitz prisoners” and “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov,” the LP had become a monster hit.When that record (which BMG executives now refer to as “JBG”) won best hip-hop/urban album at the Echo awards, Germany’s equivalent of the Grammys, other artists revolted. Some, like the classical conductor Daniel Barenboim and Klaus Voormann, the musician and artist who worked with the Beatles, returned their prizes in protest. The media and politicians in Germany — where there are strict laws against hate speech and Nazi propaganda — zeroed in on the uproar. The Echo awards were discontinued permanently.The rebuke was felt particularly strongly at BMG, which is part of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. In 2002, Bertelsmann had apologized for its past ties to the Nazi regime.In response to the uproar, BMG said it would give 100,000 euros to a campaign against antisemitism. It sponsored a series of songwriting workshops centered on opposing hate speech through music.Ms. Casimir, who had overseen the deal for “JBG” as the managing director of BMG’s German market, became a public face of the company’s campaign. “Given Germany’s history, it is everyone’s responsibility to take a stand against antisemitism and hate,” she said in a news release.The company enlisted the help of Ben Lesser, a Holocaust survivor who speaks to groups around the world through his Zachor Holocaust Remembrance Foundation. Soon after the awards, Mr. Lesser spent about three hours at a theater in Berlin, sharing his wrenching personal story with BMG employees and local schoolchildren, he and his daughter Gail Lesser-Gerber said in an interview.BMG asked Mr. Lesser, now 94, to take part in a songwriting workshop in Los Angeles in early 2019. At the five-day event, he consulted with musicians as they wrote and recorded tracks with uplifting messages, including “Letter to the World,” sung by Emily Vaughn.The label let Mr. Lesser know that to support his efforts to eradicate antisemitism, it would give the foundation the revenue generated by the songs.“Altogether, it’s been less than $100,” Ms. Lesser-Gerber said. But she said that money was not the incentive. “The motivation was to get the message out.”Lyrics About Hitler and JewsFreeze Corleone rarely speaks to the news media. His real name is Issa Lorenzo Diakhaté, and he was born in a suburb of Paris in 1992. His father is Senegalese and his mother Italian. The rapper did not respond to numerous messages sent by email and social media requesting comment for this article. A business associate who helped him arrange his deal with BMG declined to comment.Yet he speaks through his music. Rapping in a low voice, over minor-key piano figures, he performs a variation of drill, a hip-hop style often filled with dark tones and violent imagery.Many of his lyrics feature standard hip-hop tropes, like allusions to sports and pop culture. On one track he rhymes the name of Larry Bird, the Boston Celtics legend, with that of Marty Byrde, the money launderer played by Jason Bateman on Netflix’s “Ozark.” But a thread of antisemitism runs throughout his work, manifested in Nazi references, dismissals of the Holocaust, and slurs and stereotypes about Jews.He has boasted of having “the propaganda techniques of Goebbels” and “big ambitions” like “the young Adolf.” In one song, “Le Chen,” from 2016, he rapped: “I’ve got to get the khaliss moving in my community like a Jew.” In Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, where he spent time growing up, khaliss means money.Olivier Lamm, a music critic for the French newspaper Libération, said that “the thematic substance of Freeze Corleone’s rap is obsessively antisemitic.” He cited an example from one of the rapper’s early tracks in which he used a profanity in dismissing the Shoah — a term for the Holocaust — and pointed to lines on his latest album, “Riyad Sadio,” that seem to refer to Israel and Jews, with key words bleeped out.In 2020, Universal Music France released “La Menace Fantôme” (“The Phantom Menace”), which went double platinum in France, selling the equivalent of 200,000 copies there. Lyrics highlighted “Aryans,” though did not explicitly address Jews.But the album’s popularity drew attention to Freeze Corleone’s earlier lyrics about Hitler and Jewish landlords, and in the resulting controversy, he was dropped by Universal.“Finally free,” the rapper tweeted.Freeze Corleone’s name on a marquee continues to draw protests. A concert planned for late last year in Montreal was canceled after it drew condemnation from some leaders in the local Jewish community. Local officials in Rennes, France, have asked organizers to remove him from a festival next month.The Fine PrintBMG executives knew that signing Freeze Corleone could result in blowback, according to internal documents, but they were attracted to his market potential. “This signing will strengthen BMG France’s position on the strategic market of urban music and hopefully bring our first platinum local record, a key milestone to sign bigger urban acts later,” read an internal investment request memo.The memo, sent in September 2021 by two executives in the company’s French office, weighed the risks of hate speech against the financial upside of working with him.Pro: “Freeze Corleone is France’s fastest growing artist in the last 2 years,” the executives, Sylvain Gazaignes and Ronan Fiacre, wrote in the memo. “Riyad Sadio,” his album with Ashe 22, another French rapper, was ready to go and “would really help us meet our revenue target,” another document read, and it projected revenue of 1.2 million euros from the project and profit of 155,000 euros.Con: “Freeze Corleone faced controversy when releasing his first album in 2020,” the BMG memo noted, with understatement. An investigation, the memo added, had been opened by French authorities “on the grounds of incitement to racial hatred,” but had concluded “there was no ground for prosecution.”In fact, that investigation was closed with no charges brought because the statute of limitations had passed, a spokesman for the Paris prosecutor’s office told The Times.According to BMG documents, no money would be paid until executives had listened to and approved the lyrics. There would be none of the usual publicity at the time of signing the deal and “the release will be white-labelled” — meaning that no BMG logo would appear on the music or marketing materials.The contract was executed a few weeks later, with BMG stipulating that the new album had been listened to and approved. Under the terms of the contract, that should have guaranteed Freeze Corleone at least his initial payment of 500,000 euros. BMG declined to comment about whether it had paid him the money.When the two BMG employees in France approached her about the deal, Ms. Casimir, who by then had been given oversight of most of the European market, said she told them that it can be difficult to draw the proper line between artistic freedom and language that crosses lines of propriety.“You have to check the back story,” she said she told them. “You have to understand you work for a German company. You have to understand the history, because ‘JBG’ is a history. I mean, I lived in that moment.”The French employees assured her that the lyrics would be “clean,” she said, and that they would vet them before paying Freeze Corleone. Neither Mr. Gazaignes nor Mr. Fiacre responded to text messages seeking comment.BMG executives cleared the lyrics of Freeze Corleone’s album, “Riyad Sadio,” and prepared to release its first single, “Scellé Part. 4,” in late October.At the last minute, the label abruptly pulled back. Ms. Casimir said that days before the song’s scheduled release, she decided to have her team in Germany review Freeze Corleone’s past lyrics.“I must say, that was a very fast decision, the moment we translated some of those lyrics,” Ms. Casimir said. “We called the French team, said, ‘You have to end this relationship.’”She said she had alerted Hartwig Masuch, the BMG chief executive, about the termination, and that “he agreed with the next steps.” BMG did not make Mr. Masuch available for comment.After BMG canceled the deal, Freeze Corleone released the album independently. It has had modest success, drawing more than 40 million streams on Spotify.Ms. Casimir said that two of her employees in France no longer work for BMG as a result of the episode. “It has consequences,” she said. BMG executives declined to name which employees left the company; Mr. Gazaignes remains a top executive in the French division.In 2022, Ms. Casimir was promoted to chief content officer, and was given a seat on BMG’s board. More

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      in Theater

      Review: A Far-From-Revolutionary ‘Danton’s Death’ at the Comédie-Française

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      A passé take on Georg Büchner’s 1835 play about the French Revolution leans into the worst instincts of the Comédie-Française, our critic writes.It was a surprising oversight in the centuries-old repertoire of the Comédie-Française, France’s foremost theater company. Until now, it had never performed Georg Büchner’s 1835 “Danton’s Death,” arguably the best-known play set during the French Revolution.A new production by the French director Simon Delétang tried to right that wrong this week, but it may have come too late. Given the Comédie-Française’s affinity for prestige period dramas, the feuding revolutionaries of “Danton’s Death” should be an easy fit. Yet Delétang, who was until recently the director of the indoor-outdoor Théâtre du Peuple in the Vosges Mountains, plays into the company’s worst instincts, with a staging that eschews historical insight for endless grandstanding in front of candelabras.The Comédie-Française’s actors undoubtedly look good in knee breeches, but you’d be hard-pressed to know what they, or Delétang, make of the revolution, based on this production. Part of the issue is that, from a French perspective, Büchner’s play feels dated. Büchner, a German playwright, wrote it at age 21, using the historical sources available to him in the 19th century.The result, which is laced with literary references, dramatizes the rivalry between two revolutionary leaders, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Formerly friends, they are at odds when “Danton’s Death” starts, at the height of the Reign of Terror, in 1794. In the play, Danton is as hedonistic as Robespierre is inflexible; Robespierre is also ready to sacrifice anyone to the virtuous new republic — starting with Danton, whose relative moderation he has grown to despise. These are undoubtedly meaty roles, and other important historical figures make appearances, including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins.In true 19th-century fashion, “Danton’s Death” is a clash between “great men,” heroes and antiheroes, who frequently launch into lyrical monologues about blood and death. Yet much work has been done in France in recent decades to examine the blind spots of this narrative, including the oft-forgotten role of women during the revolution.There are only a handful of women in “Danton’s Death,” and when they appear, they talk about men, or listen to them. That’s hardly surprising, because Büchner was a writer of his time, but Delétang appears uninterested in finding an angle that might resonate with current audiences. Even the people — so central to the revolution — are excluded from his production: Aside from a few supporting actors appearing at a window, there is no sense of a popular uprising.A number of French directors have done great work to remedy some of these biases, starting with Ariane Mnouchkine, who focused on the people’s role in her play “1789,” which premiered in 1970. More recently, Joël Pommerat’s plainclothes “Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis” (“It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis”) captured the events of the early years of the revolution in all of their messy complexity, down to town-hall-style debates, with actors positioned in the auditorium as if audience members were 18th-century citizens, too. It was such a success that it toured for seven years, from 2015 to 2022.Loïc Corbery, who plays the title role in “Danton’s Death.”Christophe Raynaud de LageIn the wake of these works, Büchner’s Danton, a drunk with a death wish who wallows in self-pity and ends up guillotined, is hardly captivating. It doesn’t help that Delétang cast one of the Comédie-Française’s heartthrobs, Loïc Corbery, in the role. Danton, a lawyer by training, was notoriously unattractive after catching smallpox as a child and having his face mauled by a bull. Corbery is much too smooth and seductive a presence; it’s as if Timothée Chalamet turned up to play Winston Churchill.Opposite Corbery, Clément Hervieu-Léger is prissy and repressed as a bewigged Robespierre, with a dancer’s ramrod posture throughout. Guillaume Gallienne makes a suitably scary Saint-Just, and Gaël Kamilindi is a highlight in the role of Desmoulins, here a youthful dreamer whose life is cut short alongside Danton’s.The action takes place almost entirely in a cold semicircular room designed by Delétang himself, which stands in turn for a bourgeois salon, France’s revolutionary assembly and a prison. “Danton’s Death” culminates with the appearance, center stage, of a gold-rimmed guillotine that is almost as high as the walls around it. No heads roll onstage, but by that point, over two hours in, you just hope it ends the proceedings swiftly.“Danton’s Death” isn’t the first misfire on the biggest of the Comédie-Française’s three stages, the Salle Richelieu, since the company’s return from its pandemic-enforced break. And while a company director, Éric Ruf, has done much to work toward greater diversity since his appointment in 2014, men continue to dominate main-stage programming. Out of 12 productions this season, only four are directed by women, and no works by female playwrights are scheduled.On paper, it makes sense to have “Danton’s Death” in the Comédie-Française repertoire. After all, the company’s own history is tied to France’s fluctuating political governments, and some actors from the (formerly royal) troupe barely escaped the guillotine. But in Delétang’s passé production, the past never speaks to the now. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Wounded Man’: Dark Night, Lost Soul

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      In its unflinching depiction of a French teenager’s violent gay awakening, this 1983 film is among Patrice Chéreau’s most confrontational works.The radical director Patrice Chéreau was a triple-threat who earned praise and courted controversy with his risk-taking plays, operas and films. In its unflinching depiction of a French teenager’s gay awakening, “The Wounded Man” is among his most confrontational works.The film, which premiered in Cannes in 1983 and was released in the United States two years later, has a mainly underground reputation (unmentioned in Chéreau’s 2013 New York Times obituary) and so its current revival at Anthology Film Archives is something of an event.Set in a drab provincial city in France that, by the movie’s end, resembles a vast public loo, “The Wounded Man” signals its vanguard ambitions at the onset. The first head-on shot of a worn hausfrau packing a suitcase might have been lifted from “Jeanne Dielman”; a blast from avant-garde jazz artist Albert Ayler’s sax heralds Henri (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and his family racing for a bus to the train station from which his younger sister will leave for her student vacation.Leaving his family in the waiting room, Henri begins furtively cruising in the crowded terminal without exactly being sure of just what it is that he wants. His characteristic move is to stare, recoil, run and return. Dashing about like a mouse in a maze, he attracts the attention of Bosmans, a well-dressed, middle-aged masochist (Roland Bertin) who may be a doctor, and Jean, a charismatic roughneck (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) who gratifies Bosmans by beating him up in a toilet stall and seemingly pimps for the station’s abundant young hustlers.Bosmans and Henri are both obsessed with Jean, although Bosmans has a yen for Henri as well. Given the rough and tumble — physical as well as psychic — they absorb, any one of them could be the title character. All three are ruled by impulse but only Bosmans is the slightest bit introspective: “There are things you have to do to regret them later on,” he explains. Jean sets up Henri as bait in one appalling scene. He also brings him home to his long-suffering girlfriend (Lisa Kreuzer) after which Henri pilfers Jean’s outfit and begins living in the station.According to a profile of Chéreau published in The New York Times before the movie’s American release, “The Wounded Man” was inspired by Jean Genet’s quasi-autobiographical book “The Thief’s Journal.” Its obsessive characters, abrupt transitions, abstract narrative and hyper-naturalistic attention to detail also recall the French nouvelle romans of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.The movie is both stylized and visceral. “The Wounded Man” has nearly as much nudity (all of it male) and graphic sex as “Intimacy,” Chéreau’s “kitchen sink” riff on the anonymous coupling of “Last Tango in Paris.” Still, the careful framing of frenzied activity gives the movie a measure of detachment. (Janet Maslin’s Times review found it “solemn to a fault” and consequently “laced with a certain amount of inadvertent comedy.”)Appearing a couple of years into the AIDS epidemic, “The Wounded Man” was criticized both for its violence and its tormented vision of gay love. Henri’s approach-avoidance ballet inevitably climaxes in a dance of death. Chéreau’s willingness to plumb that abyss mirrors that of his protagonist.The Wounded ManJan. 5-12, Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan; anthologyfilmarchives.org. More

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      in Television

      ‘Emily in Paris’ Star Lily Collins On Her Own Trauma Haircut

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      The cast also talked about berets and big life choices at a screening and reception at the French Consulate General to celebrate Season 3.It was a gloomy, rainy 40-degree evening, but on a blue carpet inside the French Consulate General on the Upper East Side before a special screening of Season 3 of “Emily in Paris” last week, the cast was as colorful as the show.Lucien Laviscount, who plays Emily’s British boyfriend, Alfie, flashed a grin as he strolled along the line of reporters in a neon pink suit with matching sneakers. Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, who plays Emily’s French boss, Sylvie, cocked an eyebrow coyly at the cameras as she tilted her head to show off a big silver arrow piercing her right ear above an asymmetrical black gown.Kate Walsh, who plays Emily’s American boss, Madeline, struck a pose in a long white gown, thrusting out her left leg to showcase a daring thigh-high slit above a sheer black mesh panel. She was accompanied by her fiancé, Andrew Nixon.The show’s star, Lily Collins, appeared in a sparkling white long-sleeved minidress covered with silver bows, black tights and sparkling silver platform heels, and the blunt bangs her character, Emily, cuts in the first episode of the new season. (“Trauma bangs,” as Emily’s roommate Mindy, played by Ashley Park, terms them.)Emily is under pressure at the beginning of the third season of the Netflix series, which returns Wednesday. She faces big choices at work and in love. Should she stick with her Chicago boss, Madeline, at Savoir or join her French boss, Sylvie, at her new marketing firm? And should she hold out hope for the unavailable Gabriel, played by Lucas Bravo, or embrace a long-distance relationship with her flame in London, Alfie?Ms. Collins and Ms. Park said they found it relatable that Emily would reach for the scissors amid paralyzing indecision.“I had a life change haircut when I was, I think, 26,” Ms. Collins said. “I cut all my hair off — it was a pixie haircut — and I went to the Vanity Fair Oscars party and people were like, ‘What happened?’”The actress and model Camille Razat and her partner, the photographer Etienne Baret.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesLucien Laviscount and Lucas Bravo, who are “Emily in Paris” cast members.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesMs. Park, who wore a purple-and-black zebra print gown and black latex boots, said that when she was in seventh grade, she wanted wavy hair. “But I got a perm, and it was way too much, so I had to wear my hair in this topknot that I called ‘the pineapple’ for a year!” said Ms. Park, her dark brown eyes set off by bold purple eye shadow.Jeremy O. Harris, the “Slave Play” playwright who plays the designer Gregory Dupree on the show, didn’t hesitate when asked if Emily should return to Chicago.“She just needs to get away from men,” he said, dressed in a white patterned jumpsuit and long-sleeved red shrug.“There’s too much romance in Paris,” he added. “I think she should stay in Europe, but I want to see ‘Emily in Berlin’ or ‘Emily in Italy.’”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris plays the designer Gregory Dupree in “Emily in Paris.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesDarren Star, who created the series, said the show will be sticking to its title, though — at least for this season.“Emily is in Paris for the moment,” said Mr. Star, who wearing a black suit. The series was renewed for a fourth season, and, he hopes, it will extend beyond that.“If they want us back, we’re coming back,” he said. “I think there’s more story to tell.”Paris has, of course, proven thus far an inexhaustible sense of amusement for viewers as Emily navigates cultural differences like a double cheek kiss greeting and an office that doesn’t open before 10:30 a.m.“Emily going into the office that early was definitely funny,” said Camille Razat, who plays Camille, a Parisian socialite and a rival for Gabriel’s affections. Ms. Razat wore a long-sleeved red dress with matching opera gloves. “We work to live, not live to work,” she said.The French actor William Abadie agreed. He plays Antoine, the owner of a perfume company that is a client of Savoir’s. “I live in America, and I came here because I wanted to be an actor, but also because I respect the professionalism,” he said.The actor William Abadie.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesDarren Star, the creator of “Emily in Paris.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThe show’s French and American cast members shared one thing, though: affection for the beret, the round, flattish felt cap that Emily wears at least half a dozen of in the show’s first two seasons.“I have lots of berets,” said Mr. Harris, his eyes lighting up.“I have a winter beret, a summer beret. …” Ms. Walsh said.The show’s French cast members had little personal experience wearing them, though they were not opposed to the idea.“Why not?” said Mr. Bravo, who was wearing a black velvet suit.“I never wear them,” Mr. Arnold said. “I think I would,” he added, “But I like my hair too much.”Quick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

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      Jean-Marie Straub, Uncompromising Filmmaker, Is Dead at 89

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      Emerging from the French New Wave, driven by artistic purity, he and his wife and directing partner, Danièle Huillet, didn’t care if audiences walked out on their films.Jean-Marie Straub, a celebrated filmmaker aligned with the French New Wave who sparked critical debate with films he made with his wife, Danièle Huillet, that were known for their aggressively cerebral subject matter, Marxist leanings and anti-commercial sensibility, died on Sunday at his home in Rolle, Switzerland. He was 89.The Swiss National Film Archive announced his death.“The Straubs,” as they were often called (although they preferred Straub-Huillet as a professional moniker), emerged in the 1950s from the same circle of revolutionary French filmmakers as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, a friend over the years who lived nearby in Rolle until his death in September.The New Wave directors upended moviemaking conventions by channeling their cinephilic theories into auteur-driven works that reflected the anti-authoritarian sentiments of postwar France. Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet took those same impulses in a more radical direction, eschewing traditional narrative techniques and structures to create a form of ideologically driven film that proudly flouted basic standards of entertainment.Their 1981 documentary, “Too Early, Too Late,” for example, featured Ms. Huillet, in a voice-over, reading from a letter written by Friedrich Engels to the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky about the economic despair of French peasants as seemingly unrelated footage of locations in contemporary France played onscreen.Mr. Straub with his wife and filmmaking partner, Danièle Huillet, in 2002. Their films, one critic wrote, “indifferent to love or admiration, are monuments to their own integrity.”Sipa/ShutterstockThe films’ source material often seemed plucked from a graduate-level syllabus, drawing from the likes of Bertolt Brecht, the novelist and literary critic Elio Vittorini and the operas of the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg.Critics, film theorists and discerning viewers held strong views of their work, which could be seen as either poetic or tedious. Their minimalist approach to editing, cinematography and acting demanded that “one be in a mood so receptive that it borders on the brainwashed,” as Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in his review of “Class Relations,” their 1984 interpretation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, “Amerika.”The film is now hailed as one of the most accessible and beautiful of the Straub-Huillet films, but Mr. Canby said the actors’ impassive line delivery sounded “as if they were giving instructions on how to put on one’s life jacket in case of an unscheduled landing at sea.”To other critics, that steadfast commitment to an aesthetic was an artistic statement in itself. “Some movies want to be loved,” the critic J. Hoberman wrote in The New York Times reviewing a 45-film Straub-Huillet retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016. “Others prefer to be admired. And then there are the movies, like those by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, that, indifferent to love or admiration, are monuments to their own integrity.”Despite a body of work largely confined to art-house theaters and museum screenings, Mr. Straub was awarded the Leopard of Honor lifetime achievement award in 2017 by the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, an award that previously went to the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Werner Herzog and Mr. Godard. (Ms. Huillet died in 2006.) Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that Mr. Straub was “one of the least known of great filmmakers — he never had a hit or sought one.”If audiences shifted uncomfortably in their seats, so much the better. To the combative Mr. Straub, filmmaking could be a revolutionary act. “If we hadn’t learned how to make films,” he once said, “I would have planted bombs.”Mr. Straub in 2017 at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, where he received its Leopard of Honor lifetime achievement award, an honor previously bestowed on the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard. Urs Flueeler/EPA, via ShutterstockJean-Marie Straub was born on Jan. 8,1933, in Metz, in northeastern France, and was a film buff from an early age, showing an affinity for the films of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jean Grémillon.He studied literature at the Lycée Fustel-de-Coulanges in Strasbourg, eventually earning his degree from University of Nancy. In the early 1950s, he organized a film club in Metz, to which he invited Mr. Truffaut, then a provocative critic for the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and André Bazin, a Cahiers founder, to discuss films. (Mr. Straub began contributing to the magazine himself.)He met Ms. Huillet in 1954, and the couple settled in Paris, where Mr. Straub began his film career as an assistant, working on movies like Mr. Bresson’s “A Man Escaped,” released in 1956. Two years later, to avoid conscription in the Algerian War, he fled France for West Germany. He and Ms. Huillet were married in Munich in 1959, beginning a long career as expatriate filmmakers working largely in Germany, Italy and Switzerland.Their first short feature, “Not Reconciled” (1965), was adapted from a novel by Heinrich Böll, which dissects the growth and legacies of Nazism. The writer and public intellectual Susan Sontag later said the film had made her want to kiss the screen.In 1968, the couple won international acclaim for their first full-length feature, “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), which was a deconstructed version of a biopic of Johann Sebastian Bach.Set in locations in Germany where Bach had actually lived and worked, the film offers a sparse narrative consisting of voice-over reminiscences from a fictional diary by Bach’s second wife (the text was written by the filmmakers). Much of the action, as it were, is provided by musicians in period costume performing the composer’s great works.While the film baffled some critics in its day — A.H. Weiler deemed it “repetitious and static screen fare” in The Times — others, over time, came to see it as a masterpiece, a work of art “whose visual austerity, resolute slowness and refusal of conventional narrative were meant to advance a ruthless critique of capitalist aesthetics,” as A.O. Scott wrote in The Times in 2018.A scene from “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach” (1968), which won international acclaim. It was Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet’s first full-length feature film.Collection Christophel/AlamyAs their reputation grew, Mr. Straub and Ms. Huillet continued to push boundaries over the decades. Their films “From the Clouds to the Resistance” (1979) and “Sicilia!” (1999) both premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, a category reserved for artistically daring works.Critics were less kind to their 1979 adaptation of “Othon,” a 17th-century French play by Pierre Corneille, which announced its intentions to confound with a 22-word title in English: “Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or, Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn.”The film featured nonprofessional actors costumed as ancient Romans barking out the text of the play in an emotionally flat, rapid-fire fashion from the ruins of Palatine Hill in contemporary Rome, with the din of the modern city humming below.Ever the utopian, Mr. Straub said he considered the target audience of “Othon” — about a Roman nobleman’s political ambitions amid calls for bringing power to the people — to be the modern proletariat.“I would like to have ‘Othon’ seen by workers in Paris,” he was quoted as saying in a 1975 interview. “They’ve never been told that Corneille is impossible to understand.”The film, he added, “threatens not just a class, but a clique of power.”That clique of power apparently included critics at the New York Film Festival in 1970, half of whom bolted for the exit during the film’s press screening.But perhaps that was the point. As Mr. Straub once put it, “We make our films so that audiences can walk out of them.” More

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      Angelina Jolie Details Abuse Allegations Against Brad Pitt in Countersuit

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      In court papers related to a legal battle over a French winery they once owned together, she claims that he was abusive to her and their children during a 2016 plane ride.Angelina Jolie filed a cross complaint against her ex-husband Brad Pitt on Tuesday, disclosing new details about what she described in court papers as abusive behavior by him on a private plane in 2016 that led to the dissolution of their marriage.In a court filing in Los Angeles, filed as part of a legal battle over a winery the prominent Hollywood actors once owned together, lawyers for Ms. Jolie stated that negotiations to sell her share of the business to Mr. Pitt had broken down over his demand that she sign “a nondisclosure agreement that would have contractually prohibited her from speaking outside of court about Pitt’s physical and emotional abuse of her and their children.”Her filing goes on to describe an extended physical and verbal outburst in September 2016 as Mr. Pitt, Ms. Jolie and their six children flew from France to California. “Pitt choked one of the children and struck another in the face” and “grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her,” the filing states, adding that at one point “he poured beer on Jolie; at another, he poured beer and red wine on the children.” Federal authorities, who have jurisdiction over flights, investigated the incident but declined to bring criminal charges. Days after the plane trip, Ms. Jolie filed for divorce.Lawyers for Mr. Pitt did not immediately return several phone calls and emails seeking his response on Tuesday. In 2016, unnamed people close to Mr. Pitt were quoted in various publications saying that he had not been abusive toward his children.The decoupling of Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt has stretched on for years, drawn out by a court battle for custody of their children and, more recently, a lawsuit instigated by Mr. Pitt over the French winery, Château Miraval, that the couple bought more than a decade ago. Mr. Pitt’s lawsuit, filed this year, accused his ex-wife of violating his “contractual rights” when she sold her half of the company to a subsidiary of Stoli Group without his approval.Ms. Jolie’s cross complaint said she only sold her stake elsewhere after talks broke down over his demand for a nondisclosure agreement. Her filing states that the F.B.I. agent who investigated allegations that Mr. Pitt physically assaulted Ms. Jolie and their children on the plane in 2016 had “concluded that the government had probable cause to charge Pitt with a federal crime for his conduct that day.”The Château Miraval property, which is near Brignoles, in the south of France, in 2008.Lionel Cironneau/Associated PressA redacted F.B.I. report on the case, which was reported on by several news outlets in August and later obtained by The New York Times, states that the agent provided the United States Attorney’s Office “copies of a probable cause statement related to this incident.”“After reviewing the document, representative of the United States Attorney’s Office discussed the merits of this investigation with the case agent,” the report said. “It was agreed by all parties that criminal charges in this case would not be pursued due to several factors.”The F.B.I. report described Ms. Jolie as “conflicted on whether or not to be supportive of charges” related to the case.Representatives from the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles declined to comment.“She has gone to great lengths to try to shield their children from reliving the pain Pitt inflicted on the family that day,” Ms. Jolie’s lawyers wrote in the cross complaint. “But when Pitt filed this lawsuit seeking to reassert control over Jolie’s financial life and compel her to rejoin her ex-husband as a frozen-out business partner, Pitt forced Jolie to publicly defend herself on these issues for the first time.”According to Ms. Jolie’s account of the 2016 flight in the court papers, the dispute began when Mr. Pitt accused Ms. Jolie of being “too deferential” to their children and then began yelling at her in the bathroom. “Pitt grabbed Jolie by the head and shook her, and then grabbed her shoulders and shook her again before pushing her into the bathroom wall,” the filing states. “Pitt then punched the ceiling of the plane numerous times, prompting Jolie to leave the bathroom.”When one of the children came to Ms. Jolie’s defense, the court papers said, Mr. Pitt lunged at the child, prompting her to grab him from behind. Amid the altercation, Mr. Pitt “choked one of the children and struck another in the face,” the suit said.The 2016 flight has been the subject of news media reports since shortly after it occurred. In November of that year, the F.B.I. released a statement saying that it had closed its investigation into the flight and that no charges had been filed.Puck News reported this August that Ms. Jolie had been seeking information about the F.B.I.’s case as an anonymous plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, with the publication including details of the report.It is unclear whether the heavily redacted F.B.I. report included allegations that Mr. Pitt had choked or struck any of the children.Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt met each other on the set of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” a 2005 action movie in which they played married assassins. In 2008, they purchased a controlling interest in Château Miraval, viewing it as both a family home and business; several years later, the couple was married on the property.Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt have six children, now between the ages of 14 and 21.The French winery, known for its rosé, is at the center of a legal dispute between the divorced couple.In February, Mr. Pitt sued Ms. Jolie and her former company, alleging that she violated his “contractual expectations” when she sold her interest in the wine company to Tenute del Mondo, a subsidiary of Stoli Group. According to his lawsuit, the former couple had an understanding that neither party would sell its share of the winery without the consent of the other.“Jolie pursued and then consummated the purported sale in secret, purposely keeping Pitt in the dark, and knowingly violating Pitt’s contractual rights,” his lawsuit alleged.Last month, Ms. Jolie’s former company, which is now owned by Stoli Group, countersued Mr. Pitt, rebutting his version of events and his claim that the sale constituted a “hostile takeover.”In Ms. Jolie’s own countersuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, she said that she opted to sell her share of the wine business, in part, because she was growing uncomfortable with participating in an alcohol-related business, considering Mr. Pitt’s “acknowledged problem of alcohol abuse.” Mr. Pitt told The Times in 2019 that after Ms. Jolie filed for divorce, he spent time in Alcoholics Anonymous and was committed to sobriety.Her filing said there was no written or verbal understanding like the one Mr. Pitt described, claiming that Mr. Pitt had, in fact, rejected the idea that there needed to be a plan in case the relationship ended.In their lawsuits, Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie shared divergent accounts of how negotiations around him buying her portion of the wine company fell apart.Mr. Pitt’s lawsuit asserted that Ms. Jolie pulled out of the tentative deal last year after a judge overseeing the custody dispute issued a ruling against her, prompting her to turn to Stoli Group.Ms. Jolie’s countersuit claimed, however, that Mr. Pitt had been the one to pull out of the deal after she declined to agree to his nondisparagement clause, forcing her to turn to another buyer. 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      Jean-Louis Trintignant, Star of Celebrated European Films, Dies at 91

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      For 50 years, in movies like “A Man and a Woman” and “My Night at Maud’s,” his specialty was playing the flawed Everyman.Jean-Louis Trintignant, a leading French actor of subtle power who appeared in some of the most celebrated European films of the last 50 years, among them Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist,” Eric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” and Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” died on Friday at his home in southern France. He was 91.His wife, Marianne Hoepfner Trintignant, confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse. Mr. Trintignant had announced in 2018 that he had prostate cancer and was retiring.Mr. Trintignant seemed to specialize in playing the flawed Everyman and revealing his characters’ depths slowly.“Jean-Louis Trintignant has been, for better than half a century, one of the great stealth actors of the movies,” the critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New York Times in 2012. “He knows how to catch an audience unaware.”The occasion was the release that year of Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which went on to win the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. In a starring role for the first time in the millennium, Mr. Trintignant, by then nearly blind, portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva — “two titans of French cinema,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times — in a film that is both a love story and a stark examination of illness and mortality.It was the capstone to a rich career playing a gallery of characters who were rarely glamorous. Mr. Trintignant was an emotionally fragile Fascist in “The Conformist” (1970); a timid, meticulous graduate student who accidentally falls in with a ribald bon vivant in Dino Risi’s 1962 “Il Sorpasso” (“The Easy Life”); and a repressed Roman Catholic from the provinces who resists the seductive advances of a beautiful divorced woman in “My Night at Maud’s” (1969).“If some people laugh because I did not have sex with Maud, well, I would prefer being thought ridiculous to being thought a hero,” Mr. Trintignant said in a 1970 interview with The Times. “Even kissing scenes bore me.”In 1969 he won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as a magistrate investigating the assassination of a Greek politician in Costa-Gavras’s political thriller “Z,” which also won the foreign-language Oscar that year.For American audiences, Mr. Trintignant did not fit the conventional images of French film stars, like the wisecracking Jean-Paul Belmondo, the working-class hero Jean Gabin or the suave sophisticate Maurice Chevalier. He was more understated.“The best actors in the world,” he once said, “are those who feel the most and show the least.”Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born on Dec. 11, 1930, in Piolenc, a small town in southeastern France, where his father, Raoul, was a wealthy industrialist and local politician. Jean-Louis seriously considered becoming a racecar driver like his uncle Maurice Trintignant, a top competitor in the 1950s and ’60s who was only 13 years older than Jean-Louis. (Another uncle, Louis Trintignant, also raced and was killed in 1933 when his car crashed.)Jean-Louis took up law studies instead, thinking he would follow his father into politics. But while a law student in Aix-en-Provence he attended a performance of “The Miser” by Molière and was so smitten that he decided on a stage career.Mr. Trintignant moved to Paris to study acting and began appearing in theater productions at 20. After touring France in the early 1950s, he was hailed as one of the country’s most gifted young stage actors and was soon offered film contracts.Mr. Trintignant with Brigitte Bardot in “And God Created Woman” (1956), directed by Roger Vadim, Ms. Bardot’s husband at the time.Kingsley InternationalIn Roger Vadim’s 1956 movie “And God Created Woman,” Mr. Trintignant starred as a young, naïve husband who is in love with his diabolically flirtatious wife, played by Brigitte Bardot (Mr. Vadim’s wife at the time) in what was considered her breakout sex-kitten role. Whether true or not, rumors circulated that she and Mr. Trintignant had a real-life affair during the filming. Ms. Bardot’s marriage to Mr. Vadim ended in 1957.Mr. Vadim nonetheless cast Mr. Trintignant in the 1959 film “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” adapted from a sexually scandalous 18th-century novel about a scheming noblewoman. Mr. Trintignant had the lesser but romantic role of the charming Chevalier Danceny, a music teacher for French nobility.The Académie Française, the official arbiter of French culture, denounced the film as “desecrating a classic,” and it was condemned as salacious from Roman Catholic pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic.Mr. Trintignant shared top billing with Vittorio Gassman in “Il Sorpasso,” which is widely considered Mr. Risi’s masterpiece. He played a shy law student who is enticed by Mr. Gassman’s libidinous extrovert and embarks on a rollicking car journey through the Italian countryside that ends tragically.Still more memorable was Mr. Trintignant’s performance eight years laterin “The Conformist.” Based on a novel of the same title by Alberto Moravia, the film is a chilling psychological portrait of a secret policeman in Fascist Italy. Mr. Trintignant, in the lead role, arranges the assassination of his old friend, a left-wing university professor, whose young wife he covets.Mr. Trintignant assumed his most romantic role, as a racecar driver, in “A Man and a Woman” (1966). The movie was an international hit, generating more box-office receipts than any previous French film. He said his early passion for racing — and an intimate knowledge of the sport conveyed to him by his uncles — had made his performance especially credible.But he professed that he was uncomfortable in the movie’s explicit love scenes, in which his co-star was Anouk Aimée, a longtime friend of his wife at the time, the director Nadine Trintignant.“It was embarrassing to find myself in bed with a woman that way,” he told The Times in 1970. “I had known Anouk for 10 years, and she was Nadine’s best friend, and the whole crew was watching.” The movie’s best scenes, Mr. Trintignant insisted, were his hairpin racing turns in Monte Carlo.He went on to appear in an average of three films a year for the next three decades, more often as a supporting actor than as the lead.Mr. Trintignant in “Amour” (2012), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. By then nearly blind, he portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva.Sony Pictures ClassicsAn exception was the acclaimed 1994 film “Red,” the finale of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy. In a work that tracks the parallel lives of a group of people living outside Geneva, Mr. Trintignant played a cold retired judge who spied on his neighbors using high-tech surveillance equipment.He also continued to act onstage occasionally.Later in life Mr. Trintignant returned to his early passion for sports-car racing, participating in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1980 and the Monte Carlo Rally in 1984. In the ’90s he spent much of his time tending a vineyard he operated in the South of France or acting in theater. His return to film in “Amour” came after an absence of more than a decade.Mr. Trintignant’s first marriage, to the actress Stéphane Audran, ended in divorce. He married Nadine Marquand, then an actress, in 1960 and had three children with her: Vincent, now a director; Pauline, who died in infancy; and Marie, a successful actress (she had acted alongside her father at age 4 in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother) and the mother of four who at 41 was beaten to death in her hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the summer of 2003 while filming there.The murder was a sensation in the European press. Ms. Trintignant’s 39-year-old boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat, one of France’s biggest rock stars, later admitted in a Lithuanian court that he had beaten her in a jealous rage over her plans to vacation with an ex-husband.He was convicted of manslaughter in 2004 and released on parole in 2007, angering the Trintignant family and its supporters.After Marie’s death, Mr. Trintignant fell into a severe depression.“For three months I didn’t speak,” he told the Montreal newspaper The Gazette in 2012. “After that I realized I had to either stop living, commit suicide or continue to live.”In 2011 he withdrew from a planned one-man show at the summer Avignon Festival in France when he learned that Mr. Cantat was to appear at the festival as well in an acting role onstage.Mr. Trintignant’s marriage to Nadine Trintignant ended in divorce in 1976. He married Marianne Hoepfner, a racecar driver, in 2000. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Trintignant’s eyesight deteriorated in his later years, but he was accepting of his condition. “We weren’t meant to live more than 80 years,” he told The Gazette. “It’s not so bad as all that. I’m still happy when I’m alone. I have an inner life.”Even at the height of his popularity, Mr. Trintignant insisted that acting was always a struggle.“I am not a born actor,” he said in the 1970 Times interview. “Even today, I am not an instinctive actor. I prepare meticulously, and it is only when I am before the camera that I become completely free.” More