Michèle Morgan was more of a face and a presence than a personality on screen. As a star she was one of the cool, enigmatic variety. Depths of emotion were conveyed, if at all, by the noncommittal monosyllable, the slow breathing out of cigarette smoke, the scarcely perceptible flicker of an eyelid that might possibly hold within it a furtiva lacrima. Those who did not care for her work could never see what the fuss was about, while devotees hung agog on her every meaningful pause. At least they could all appreciate her looks: she was said to have the most beautiful eyes in the world and her exquisitely chiselled features remained miraculously unlined into her seventies, somehow insisting that she was more than just a pretty face.
She was to have been Humphrey Bogart’s co-star in the classic wartime drama Casablanca. However, she was under contract to RKO, one of the big studios, and it wanted $55,000 to lend her to Warner Bros. For less than half that sum Hal Wallis, the producer of Casablanca, hired another new European actress called Ingrid Bergman. Casablanca opened at the end of 1942, cashing in on the Moroccan city being in the news because Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle were meeting there in January 1943, and went on to become a classic.
Wallis attempted to repeat the success of Casablanca with Passage to Marseille (1944), but this time with the elusive Morgan as the object of Bogart’s affections. It was another wartime tale of doomed romance and featured many of the the same cast and crew as Casabalanca. What he did not have was the magic that made Casablanca so special. Morgan found Bogart uncommunicative and she disliked Michael Curtiz, the director.
Bergman went on become a Hollywood legend while Morgan returned to France, where she always had Paris. There she enjoyed considerable success, becoming the first recipient of the best actress award at the Cannes film festival for her role in The Pastoral Symphony (1946), in which she played a blind orphan adopted by a married pastor who falls in love with her. After her death President Hollande described her as a legend — but there is a difference between a French legend and a Hollywood one.
She was born Simone Renée Roussel in 1920 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, an affluent Parisian suburb, although her family fell on hard times and her father, who worked for a perfume company, transplanted them to Dieppe. A troublesome child, she ran away in her early teens and lived with her grandmother, who encouraged her ambitions to become an actress. She soon made her first stage appearance and won second prize in a competition for the most photogenic young hopeful. Armed with this, she ran off to Paris, where she managed to get walk-on parts in plays and worked as an extra in several films, including Mademoiselle Mozart (1935) in which, billed as Simone Morgan, she appeared as an elephant trainer.
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She took drama lessons and adopted the name Michèle Morgan, arguing that she did not have the body of a Simone while Morgan sounded more appropriate for a Hollywood star. Wearing a raincoat and a beret, she made a considerable impact in Marcel Carné’s moody drama Le Quai des Brumes (1938), opposite Jean Gabin, who became her lover. They came to represent to many filmgoers the couple idéal of French films, the typical fighters against a malign destiny that seemed to hang over so much of French cinema in the 1930s. They were reunited in Le Récif de Corail (1939) and Jean Grémillon’s exquisite Remorques (1940).
When war broke out Morgan was appearing, with many of the most notable French stars of the day, in Julien Duvivier’s family chronicle Untel Père et Fils. As the the Germans moved in, Morgan moved out, heading for Hollywood, where she found herself part of a sizeable French colony. She soon made a successful debut in Joan of Paris (1942), a French Resistance drama.
Seemingly destined for Hollywood stardom, Morgan had a home built in Benedict Canyon that was designed in the style of a 19th-century French farmhouse. It was somewhat isolated and Morgan talked of being scared to be there alone. She moved out when she married the actor William Marshall, whom she had known for a few weeks, in 1942; more than a quarter of a century later the actress Sharon Tate and four others were murdered there by followers of Charles Manson.
Marshall nicknamed her Mike and they had a son called Mike Marshall — he also became an actor and died in 2005. The marriage soon turned sour. During acrimonious divorce proceedings Marshall, who died in 2003, had her followed to secure evidence of adultery and gain custody of their son. In 1950 she married Henri Vidal, the French actor, who died in 1959. Marshall later married Ginger Rogers while Morgan had a relationship with Gérard Oury, another actor, until his death in 2006, although they never married. “With Gérard, we never had anything in common and that’s why we lasted for fifty years,” she said.
Numerous actors and actresses were considered for Casablanca, including at one point Ronald Reagan, but in April 1942 Warner Bros announced that the lead roles would be played by Bogart and Morgan. However, the deal came undone after Wallis wrote to the director, saying: “There is no reason in the world for demanding this kind of money for anyone as little known as Michèle Morgan.”
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She made only four more movies in Hollywood, including Higher and Higher, a 1943 musical that gave Frank Sinatra his first significant film role, and Passage to Marseille. It seems she had tired of being a “balloon transported by circumstances” and after the war she returned to France. Reflecting on her time in Tinseltown, she said: “Hollywood crushed my personality. They tried to make me look like everybody else and photographed me badly.”
She regained her pre-eminent position in France, her knowledge of English standing her in good stead. A return to America produced The Chase (1946) and in 1948 she gave one of her best performances in Sir Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol, based on a story by Graham Greene, as the butler’s enigmatic mistress. Other trips abroad resulted in Fabiola (1949), a Franco-Italian production in which she starred with Vidal in a story of ancient Rome.
In 1950 René Clément’s Le Château de Verre seemed to suggest an interesting extension of her range, but otherwise even her greatest admirers had to admit that she was in danger of falling a victim to her own mannerisms: the beauty tended to become an inexpressive mask behind which unfathomable emotions might, or might not, be stirring. As one of the stars of the cinéma de papa, a tradition of quality so despised by the new wave, she had little to do with the more dynamic areas of French cinema in the 1960s, although she was ready to work with young film-makers if they asked and did make some telling appearances in films such as François Reichenbach’s cinéma-vérité Un Coeur Gros Comme Ça, in which she represented the young Senegalese boxer’s romantic ideal.
Latterly she worked in television and theatre and spent much of her time painting and writing poetry. She also designed ties and set up a business called Cravates Michèle Morgan. In an interview with Paris Match in 2008 she admitted that missing out on Casablanca was a “disappointment” — which was perhaps an understatement. Maybe Casablanca would have made her a Hollywood star and Bergman might have been left in obscurity. Or maybe Casablanca might have ended up no better known today than Passage to Marseille.
Michèle Morgan, actress, was born on February 29, 1920. She died on December 20, 2016, aged 96