8 Aquick online search for the French actress Maria Schneider comes up with the following results: How old was Maria Schneider when she died? What was her controversial scene in Last Tango in Paris? Whatever happened to Maria Schneider? These questions suggest the life of an artist who died too soon, who courted risk and danger, and perhaps whose story has been omitted and discounted in the public record. The portrait these questions convey is exactly the narrative that Vanessa Schneider would like to complicate in My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir (160 pgs., Scribner, 2023, $26). Based in Paris, France, Vanessa Schneider is a novelist and journalist who writes for the daily Le Monde. Schneider’s eighth book, My Cousin Maria Schneider was published in 2018 under the original title Tu t’appelais Maria Schneider. The memoir is the first of Schneider’s books to be translated into English, and it has been done so by Molly Ringwald, the writer and actress perhaps best known for movies such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986), and who previously published her first translation, Lie With Me, in 2019. In Ringwald’s graceful translation, Vanessa Schneider’s spare prose renders the jagged contours of her cousin’s life with sympathy and honesty. Vanessa Schneider is the younger cousin to her more famous relative, Maria Schneider. As a child, Vanessa was enthralled with her older cousin — her image and that she made celebrities seem that much closer. Maria Schneider began working in the film industry as a teenager. Her most recognized role was in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 erotic thriller Last Tango in Paris, the impact of which Vanessa Schneider considers on her cousin’s life in the book. Because of that movie, Maria Schneider would be typecast as a sexy ingenue — a role that would trap her and that she would rebel against later in her life. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, Schneider starred in several other films, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s drama The Passenger, René Clément’s thriller Wanted: Babysitter, and Nouchka van Brakel’s Dutch drama A Woman Like Eve, among others. As the decades went on, her work decreased. It wasn’t until the new millennium that Maria Schneider’s story and achievements were reconsidered, and in July 2010, she received the medal of Chevalier, Ordre des Artes et des Lettres. Vanessa Schneider’s slim memoir opens with a deathbed scene: a tired Maria Schneider drinking champagne and toasting her “beautiful life.” On February 3, 2011, at the age of 58, she would die of cancer. The media’s response to Schneider’s death would commemorate the tragic end to a tragic actress. “The articles all tell the same story, more or less”, Schneider writes. “There’s the hedonism of the seventies, the cruelty of the film business and, of course, the sex and drugs.” Part of the story that Vanessa Schneider wants to tell about her cousin is the neglect she experienced both in childhood and in her career. Maria was born out of an affair between the famous actor Daniel Gélin, who wouldn’t recognize her as his daughter until after her career success, and Marie Christine Schneider, who kicked her 15-year-old daughter out of the house after an argument. From there, the troubled child went to live briefly with her uncle and aunt. Her uncle and aunt would house Maria until they gave birth to their first child, Vanessa Schneider. This fact would disturb the author, and in a sense makes her feel guilty. She writes, “I have the unpleasant sensation of having chased you away — that had you stayed with Papa and Maman, perhaps your life would have unfolded differently.” It was while living with her uncle and aunt that Maria Schneider rekindled a relationship with her father, who would take her away from school and bring her to film sets and nightclubs, where parent and child stayed out until morning. Through her father, Maria met a coterie of industry professionals, including talent like Alain Delon. At Schneider’s funeral, Delon would read a letter from the household name Brigitte Bardot, a family friend who would invite the teenage Schneider to live in her apartment after the author’s parents could no longer house her. Maria Schneider’s entry into the film industry became a slippery slope. She had only a handful of credits to her name before the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci cast her in a lead role across from a middle-aged Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. The film tells the story of a sexual entanglement between a man mourning his wife and a young woman. The film sparked controversy over the violent scene in which Brando’s character sodomizes Schneider’s. As Vanessa Schneider recounts her cousin’s experience, this scene was not planned and would mark her cousin’s career for the rest of her life, for both the trauma it incurred and the public attention it brought her. “For decades you refused to speak about Tango”, writes Schneider. “Anytime the movie was mentioned, you froze. In an interview in 1983, more than ten years after the film was released, you implored the journalist, your hands clasped in prayer, ‘No, please. I don’t want to talk about that film.’ ” One of the more heartbreaking threads in the memoir deals with Schneider’s drug use. Schneider wonders how early her cousin began using heroin and recalls scenes from her own childhood when Maria would visit. Once she even found Maria with the needle in her arm. “It’s because of you that I have such a finely attuned radar for drug addicts”, Schneider writes. With My Cousin Maria Schneider, Vanessa Schneider has written a tender portrait of her beloved cousin — a portrait that does as much to empathize with the circumstances Maria Schneider lived with and to reckon with the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of her character. The memoir is poignant in its assessment of Maria Schneider as an artist and broadens the scope to examine the darker sides of the film industry. Writer and journalist Vanessa Schneider delves into her cousin’s complex history with fame, drugs, and family life. Maria Schneider: Memoir Explores the Actress’ Troubled Relationship with the Industry June/July 2023 Book Review By Luis Polanco Part of the story that Vanessa Schneider wants to tell about her cousin is the neglect she experienced both in childhood and in her career.
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