Carole Bouquet has been cast, again and again, as the poised, unsmiling woman with something going on behind the face. It gave a Roger Moore Bond its one serious person, and gave Bertrand Blier a face to build his satires around.
Fi1m perspective
Melina Havelock buries her parents in Corfu, picks up a crossbow and does not smile again for most of For Your Eyes Only (1981). That is the right choice for a woman in mourning and an awkward one for a Roger Moore Bond, where everyone else is having a lovely time and Moore cannot stop being pleasant. The script seems to know it and keeps the two of them apart for much of the middle. Elizabeth Waller dresses her in black and white against Moore's cream, so you can tell at a glance who is grieving. We believed the mourning; the film around her is less sure what to do with it.
That stillness was there from the start. Bouquet was not yet twenty, and had spent only a short time at the Paris Conservatoire, when Luis Buñuel cast her as Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), a debut she has since called a miracle. Bertrand Blier saw what could be done with a face that gives nothing away and used it three times, first in Buffet Froid (1979), where the deadpan turns out to work as well for absurdist comedy as for mourning, and then in Too Beautiful for You (1989), his satire on beauty and desire, with Bouquet as Florence Barthélémy. Gérard Depardieu has been opposite her in six films, more than any other actor, and the pairing makes sense: he fills a room and she declines to.
The cost of the face was a decade of being cast for it rather than for what she could do with it. She has said as much: “It took me such a long time to get strong parts, but now I can’t get to be just a normal woman with a little bit of charm.” Hollywood sent scripts with monsters in them and she turned them down for French work. Later came Wasabi (2001), opposite Jean Reno, and steady work in French cinema, television and theatre through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
Start with the Bond, since it is the one we can point you to, and she is the reason it remembers it is about a dead man on a boat. Then go to Blier, where the face is asked to do more than mourn. Do not expect her to warm up. The films that use her best never wanted her to.
Biography
Carole Bouquet is a French actress and model. She was born on 18 August 1957 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. After studying at the Conservatoire Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, she made her film debut in Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
Bouquet is known for her role as Melina Havelock in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981). She won the César Award for Best Actress for her performance in Too Beautiful for You (1989) and received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Rive droite, rive gauche (1984). She has appeared in numerous French and international films, including New York Stories (1989) and Wasabi (2001).
In the 1980s and 1990s she was a model for Chanel and the face of Chanel No. 5. She has also worked in theatre and television.
