A prima ballerina who acted briefly. Her Marie Charlet in Moulin Rouge (1952) is quick, hard and unsentimental, in a film that is otherwise solemn and slow, and then she went back to the stage.
Fi1m perspective
Marie Charlet, the streetwalker José Ferrer's Toulouse-Lautrec takes home in Moulin Rouge (1952), does not soften. Colette Marchand plays her as someone doing sums: his rooms are a lodging, he is the wallet attached to them, and every kindness she shows is priced before it is offered. The rest of John Huston's film is a solemn, sorrowing artist biopic that slows to the pace of a sitting. Her scenes with Ferrer are the exception. They are nasty in a way the film otherwise cannot manage, and we winced at them, properly, more than once, because she never asks us to like Marie or to forgive her.
That she could do this on a first go is less surprising when you know where she came from. Marchand trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school and danced in its corps in the 1940s under Serge Lifar, then joined Roland Petit's Ballets de Paris and became its prima ballerina. Petit's work was revue-flavoured and theatrical, and it suited her: in L'Oeuf à la coque (1949) she played a chicken in black tights and made her entrance out of a giant egg, which is the kind of thing that gets a dancer noticed and got her the nickname "Les Legs". She took the company to Broadway between 1949 and 1951. Her first film credit was a voice, in Isidore Isou's experimental Venom and Eternity (1951), and Orson Welles wrote the scenario for the ballet The Lady in the Ice (1953) with her in mind.
A dancer of that sort knows exactly what a body is worth and how to make an audience look at it, which is more or less Marie Charlet's trade. What Marchand brings to the part is control: she is quick and hard, and nothing she does asks for pity. It is a small performance in a long film, and the film is better whenever it remembers she is in it.
The screen did not keep her. She made a few more films in 1954 and then went back to dance, with companies including the Marquis de Cuevas ballets, and that was that. Some have read this as promise unfulfilled. We are not sure it is. She had a career already, a good one, and she went back to it. Asked about the nickname, she said: "Legs are legs. They work well. But what are legs? Just bones with meat on them." That is roughly the tone she gives Marie.
See Moulin Rouge for its first reel and for her. Almost everything else she did happened on a stage and went the way stage work goes, which is to say it is gone.
Biography
Colette Marchand was a French ballerina and actress. She trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school and joined the company before performing with Roland Petit's Les Ballets de Paris from the late 1940s.
She appeared as Marie Charlet in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge, directed by John Huston, for which she received the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer – Female and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She performed on Broadway in Roland Petit's L'Oeuf à la coque (The Boiled Egg) in 1950 and had a featured role in the 1951 musical Two on the Aisle.
Marchand was born in Paris on 29 April 1925 and died on 5 June 2015. She was married to Jacques Bazire, musical director for the Roland Petit Ballet.
