Charlotte Rampling Made in France: From a National to a Postnational Identity

Abstract

By examining the recent career steps of Charlotte Rampling, this chapter questions the evolution of her real and imaginary identity fluidity, which is based on a variable articulation between constructions of the national, the international and the global. Although the actress’s spoken accent maintains the trace of her English origins, three facts blur the sharpness of this identity. Rampling has systematically dubbed herself in English as well as in French, creating an intercultural fluidity; she has revived and intensified her ability to express the interiority of her characters through the universal language of silence; and finally her characters are alternately English, integrated into a French collective while her own identity remains vague; or, in French co-productions that mark a new trend within her filmography, postnationally indexed and inflected.

Born in Sturmer in 1946 to a British Army colonel and a painter, Charlotte Rampling began her career as an actress in London of the Swinging Sixties. She moved to Italy in 1966 after her sister committed suicide, an event that deeply affected her family history. She became a household name with her appearances in Italian cinema, including in La caduta degli dei/The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969) and Il portiere di notte/The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974). Her first French period lasted from 1975 to 1986 (and could be extended to 1996 if four television films are counted), with forays into Hollywood (Farewell, My Lovely [Dick Richards, 1975]; Stardust Memories [Woody Allen, 1980]; The Verdict [Sidney Lumet, 1982]; as well as Angel Heart [Alan Parker, 1987]), before a period of decline in the 1990s due to depression. She proclaimed her European identity from a very young age: ‘I didn’t want to stay English, because I am very English. If I just stayed English, in England doing English things, there were a lot of barriers, since you are on an island. I wanted to travel,’ she stated (Gesbert 2020). She added that after the death of her sister, her self-exile in Italy and then in France was beneficial, changing her public image to that of a European. She remained attached to this idea of an identity that was fragmented and somewhat marginal, choosing to live outside her country of origin and professing not to feel truly at home anywhere. She needed to turn towards more sombre roles to, as she put it, ‘work on the dark matter of life’ (Angelier and Rouyer 2019). This accounts for her predilection for art cinema and the arts in general. Today, she paints, in a very dark style; works on photography in front of and behind the camera; sings; and in 2015 published a striking first book, an impressionistic autobiography entitled Who I Am/Qui je suis.

Ironically, she seems to have experienced a revival in her international career following a comeback in France with Sous le sable/Under the Sand (François Ozon, 2000), at a time when she had reached a pivotal age for an actress and had somewhat drifted into obscurity. She won the ‘Grownups Award’ for Best Actress—a prize for films made by and aimed at people over 50—for this film in the first year of the awards’ existence. That same year, Patrice Chéreau presented her with an honorary César, describing the film as a triumphant return for the actress. She would go on to receive nominations and awards for acting at the Césars and the European Film Awards, shining again in the international spotlight (see Table 1), even after the controversy that struck when she was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for 45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015). That year’s awards were condemned and boycotted for the lack of any nominations for Black artists. Rampling, in a live radio interview, accused critics of ‘anti-white racism’, adding, ‘Maybe no Black actor or actress deserved to make it to the final selection’ (Roux 2016).

Table 1 Charlotte Rampling’s nominations and awards for major European and US prizes^a

A British citizen who lives in France, where she spent part of her childhood and has frequently worked, Rampling is sometimes referred to as a French actress by foreigners, from the Hollywood Reporter (Kit 2019) announcing the cast of the remake of Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021) to Mick LaSalle (2012, 96) including her in his book on French actresses. In France, she is regularly presented as the ‘most French of the British (along with Jane Birkin)’ (Mérigeau 2002).¹ Such pronouncements act as a reminder of the way in which the cultural capital of identities varies for different audiences. Hence, playing up clichés of national identity (without meta-textual self-aware gesturing of the kind examined by Anne Kaftal’s chapter in this volume) tends to target exogenous audiences (Elsaesser 2013): Birkin’s more extreme caricature of upper-class Englishness, notably through her accent, is if anything a source of humour in British popular culture. However, in the case of Rampling, even for the British she has maintained a somewhat ‘exotic’ aura, and the actress likes to define herself this way (Elmhirst 2014). Thus in an article in The Guardian promoting the series Broadchurch (Chris Chibnall, 2015, Season 2), she is described as a ‘great brooding figure from the continent’ (Elmhirst 2014), highlighting her status as something of an outsider in the British Isles: she has lived in Paris longer than she ever lived in London, and was married to an Englishman (the actor Bryan Southcombe) before two marriages with Frenchmen (Jean-Michel Jarre, then Jean-Noël Tassez).

One could speculate that this continental Englishwoman’s comeback in French cinema has coincided with the acceleration of the floating conception of national cinema that has been outlined by Thomas Elsaesser: ‘neither essentialist nor constructivist, but more like something that hovers uncertainly over a film’s “identity”’ (Elsaesser 2013, §19). Rampling embodies an increasingly fluid transnational identity that is becoming ever more postnational. While the actress still speaks with an English accent, three factors make her identity less clear-cut: its greater geo-cultural fluidity when her voice is dubbed, her powerful use of silence as a universal language and changes over time in the roles she has played in French films (roles characterised by a vaguely English identity, co-productions in which she takes the role of a non-English European character and sci-fi films where she plays an otherworldly figure). The remainder of this chapter examines these three aspects of Rampling’s evolving star persona.

‘Auto-reverse’ Dubbing

Since 1977, one year after meeting Jean-Michel Jarre and two years after appearing in her first French film, La Chair de l’orchidée/The Flesh of the Orchid (Patrice Chéreau, 1975), Rampling has nearly always done her own dubbing. Even though she has spoken French since she was a child, her command of the language was slightly rusty in her first appearance on French television, in a 1974 promotion for Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974), but she spoke fluently when she promoted Chéreau’s film barely one year later. Dubbing herself, both in English and in French, has been vitally important to her. The language, accent, texture and timbre of her voice go hand in hand with her image and are essential in order to fully grasp this. In an interview about the Franco-Danish series Kidnapping (Arte/TV2 Danmark, 2019), she explains, ‘I’ve always wanted to dub myself because I speak French, I live in France and a large part of what I do is my voice. So I would prefer, if possible, not to have someone else “take” my French voice [or my English voice]’ (Nurbel 2020). Previously, in the first part of her career, the actress’s artistic identity was incomplete, since an element of her Europeanness was still missing. Her first French film was therefore an important milestone. Her secondary role in the blockbuster production Assassin’s Creed (Justin Kurzel, 2016) has been the only exception to the rule since 1977. This habit of ‘auto-reverse’ dubbing has given her a certain cross-cultural fluidity as well as facilitating a diffuse but continuous form of self-alteration that has become more pronounced since she began participating in large-scale, high-budget films (Spy Game [Tony Scott, 2001]; Basic Instinct 2 [Michael Caton-Jones, 2006]; Dune) and series (Dexter, Season 8 [Showtime, 2013]; Broadchurch) in the 2000s. The effect of rearticulating the self comes through just as much in these productions as it does in interviews given by the actress.

Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003), a French film with an English title that casts Rampling as a sour, cynical British crime writer, was shot mostly in English, with the passages in French subtitled for export. Rampling overplays her character’s English accent by failing to pronounce her ‘r’s when speaking French. The actress explains:

In my view, Swimming Pool is a film that is entirely in English. The French I use isn’t the language I speak in real life. It’s the language of an Englishwoman who only speaks some French and speaks it poorly. It was an odd experience, by the way. People are different, depending on whether they are speaking one language or another. Their voice, their intonations: everything changes! When I speak English, I find myself more down to earth, less romantic. […] English is a blunt, straightforward language, definitely not a language of seduction. […] Do you have the feeling that this changes your performance? Of course. And that’s a good thing: it’s another card in the deck. (In Lepage and Rouchy, 2022)

Heavily influenced by Hitchcock, while at the same time filled with references to European and especially French films (La Piscine [Jacques Deray, 1969]; Tristana [Luis Buñuel, 1970]; Les Diaboliques [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955]; Ozon’s earlier films and the works of Claude Chabrol, among others), it was quite profitable, like Sous le sable, although it had a higher budget and was aimed at a larger audience (see Table 2).

Table 2 Box-office results and profitability of François Ozon’s films from 2001 to 2003^a

While Sous le sable enjoyed success at festivals, bringing visibility and international recognition to its director and making 8 femmes/8 Women (François Ozon, 2002) financially possible, Swimming Pool confirmed that success with good commercial results in the USA—still the best today for any of Ozon’s films, since 8 femmes comes in a distant second with a little over $3 million in revenue despite a worldwide rate of return of over 500 per cent. It was Charlotte Rampling’s third most successful film in the USA, but the only one in which she took the leading role and easily the most profitable, after Babylon A.D. (Matthieu Kassovitz, 2008), which brought in $22.5 million, and the co-production Assassin’s Creed, which made $54.6 million in North American revenue. Swimming Pool’s plot is based on her encounter with the figure of a young, exuberant Frenchwoman (Ludivine Sagnier). The product of cross-fertilisation between reality and imagination, between the realist and theatrical veins of Ozon’s cinema, this meeting revives the culinary, creative and sexual appetites of the introverted, sour writer as she develops her new novel in a farmhouse in the Luberon, close to the Marquis de Sade’s estate, as one line mentions. The relationship between the two characters is also one of mutual give and take between two clichés of English and French female identities—an Agatha Christie-style ‘crime queen’ and a crass, provocative young woman from the south of France. The former gradually takes on the latter’s epicurean qualities (see Fig. 1): Rampling gives up her low-fat cottage cheese and Diet Coke and steals her housemate’s charcuterie, foie gras and wine.

Fig. 1

Charlotte Rampling’s uptight and cerebral English woman is seduced by the French sensuality embodied by Ludivine Sagnier in Swimming Pool

Rampling’s venture into French cinema and into the French language thus engendered a hybrid identity compared to the one she had established in the first part of her career; this new identity was carried primarily by her voice. From this point on, she became a British actress who was particularly French, avoiding the dulling effect of dubbing in European films that, as Mark Betz has shown, leads to a loss of meaning and cultural identity for many actors and actresses (Betz 2009, 1–43). She thus reconnected with the tradition of polyglot European performers from the era of multiple versions in the 1930s, allowing her to make connections between England and France as well as between Europe and the USA while still maintaining her authenticity. When she finally tried her hand at theatre after many years acting only on the screen, her first role was in a Marivaux play, La Fausse suivante, at the National Theatre in London in 2004, underlining the hybridity that had become a key component of her media DNA.

Silent Strength as a Universal Language

The string of French films that revitalised Rampling’s career in the early 2000s repeatedly relied on the power of her silence, a universal language that transcends national identity, in order to convey the inner life of her characters (Le Gras 2021, 253–255). Her comeback, beginning with Sous le sable, was marked by leading roles associated with inwardness and intimacy (Embrassez qui vous voudrez/Summer Things [Michel Blanc, 2002]; Swimming Pool; Lemming [Dominik Moll, 2005]; Vers le sud/Heading South [Laurent Cantet, 2005]; Désaccord parfait/Twice Upon a Time [Antoine de Caunes, 2006]). In a 1983 interview, she mentioned that she preferred cinema to theatre for the intimacy that comes with appearing in front of the camera (Defaye 1983). Her acting often goes beyond words: she expresses herself through minute facial vibrations and unspoken feelings emanating from her that she tensely holds back, making her a favourite subject of great photographers. Without ever becoming overbearing, the actress has managed to make her silence and mysteriousness stand out even more in the years since Sous le sable, which relied extensively on these elements. Ozon himself stated that ‘simply filming her in close-up told a story on its own. It was already fiction, because there are wrinkles, expressions, a sadness, a melancholy, something that catches the light and the camera’ (Ozon 2018). The actress has always preferred to choose roles that were in sync with her life, often involving a certain masochism, feeding off the drama she has lived through, not in the manner of the Actors Studio, but instinctively. As she explained to Bernard Rapp (2001), acting ends up being a form of therapy, and Sous le sable brought her closure, exorcising the denial of her sister’s death by allowing her to act out a similar situation:

I couldn’t have played the character of Marie without the power of experience. These are emotions that you can’t reproduce if you haven’t experienced them yourself. So I didn’t hesitate to expose myself, in every sense. (Baudin 2001)

Without giving in to the masochistic, belittling cultural representation of ageing as a decline, which has long been associated with maturing actresses, Sous le sable is also the rebirth of a woman’s independent personality at a turning point in her life, brought on by age and by her husband’s mysterious disappearance. According to Rampling, Ozon ‘didn’t want it to be overly emotional. Every time I went a little too far, I felt that he didn’t like it. He didn’t want neurotic reactions’ (Tesson 2001, 57). Sous le sable is an ambitious film that reveals Marie’s inner character by creating a blur between reality, dreaming and psychological vulnerability. It shows a process of mourning that is never carried out, an absence that gradually restructures the life of a woman who learns to live alone. Marie asserts her own subjectivity by rejecting the demands of her social circle: her friends encouraging her to rebuild her life; her mother-in-law’s cruel words, blaming her for the loss of her son; advice from doctors not to see the body; etc. Marie is seen as troubling because she chooses to escape from a highly codified social structure in order to invent a new identity for herself, responding only to her own desires, even when they are only dreams. Although she is destabilised by the loss of her husband, a fixture in her life, the film shows her grappling with both her grief and her full independence, specifically by refusing to become involved in a new relationship despite her friends and family insisting. The disturbing richness of the heroine’s intimate life, as her suffering brings her to the brink, is largely expressed by Rampling turning her melancholy gaze inward, acting with typically English restraint while maintaining a strong physical presence; she plays a more ordinary, everyday character than in her previous roles as femmes fatales.² We follow her point of view without fully grasping her thoughts. The intensity of her silence and her lost gaze in scenes where she is alone are embodied in everyday activities, when she takes off her make-up in front of the mirror, for example, revealing her inner life while keeping us at a distance (see Fig. 2). This register and the ability to display such a complex inner character on screen while keeping her speech to a minimum revived her international career, as evidenced by her appearances in the noted documentary The Look (Angelina Maccarone, 2011) shown at Cannes; 45 Years, which earned her an Oscar nomination at the age of 70 and the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival; and Hannah (Andrea Pallaoro, 2017), for which she won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. Time has worked in her favour, deepening the intensity of a steely gaze now framed by sagging eyelids and thus renewing her greatest asset, ‘The Look’. Expressing the weariness of life experience as age has brought an organic, epidermal, sometimes mineral dimension to her silence, Rampling’s mute stare is all the more powerful because few stars choose to age naturally, as she has.

Fig. 2

Rampling’s faraway gaze indicates her character’s active inner life in Sous le sable

From a Specific to a Generic Form of Otherness

In Rampling’s French films, from Sous le sable to Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021), four patterns can be identified that ultimately track a move in her characterisation as geo-culturally ‘other’ from not only specificity to generality but by the same token, I argue, from transnational to more postnational iterations of her persona.

The first involves films mostly made in the 2000s that clearly define Rampling’s character as English (Swimming Pool; Vers le sud; Désaccord parfait; Quelque chose à te dire/Blame It on Mum [Cécile Telerman, 2009]; Rio Sex Comedy [Jonathan Nossiter, 2010]), as well as comprising most of her previous French films (La Chair de l’orchidée; Un taxi mauve/The Purple Taxi [Yves Boisset, 1977]; On ne meurt que deux fois/He Died with His Eyes Open [Jacques Deray, 1985]; and Max mon amour [Nagisa Oshima, 1986]).³ The actress serves in these roles as an explicitly exotic element, creating oppositions or attractions based on identity: colonised/colonisers; France/England; old Europe/developing countries. Speaking English (as in Vers le sud and Rio Sex Comedy, which bring together characters of different nationalities) works as a marker associating characters with the upper class, as it does in La Grande illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937). Specifically, Thérèse de Raedt observes that in Vers le sud, the three North American heroines

generally speak English with each other when they are alone but speak French in the presence of Haitians […] The use of languages points out social, political and economic status: English indicates neo-colonial exploitation; French, vestiges of the past and a certain social status; Creole is the language of the people, who are trying to survive as best they can. (De Raedt 2008, 124)

As in the short story by Dany Laferrière, which the film adapts by setting the action under the dictatorship of François Duvalier, these women deliver monologues about their experiences in Port-au-Prince, which for them is a sort of no man’s land where Western social norms no longer apply and they have fulfilled themselves sexually in ways that their age and social status make impossible in their own countries. Charlotte Rampling plays Ellen, an Englishwoman in her fifties who teaches French at Wellesley College in Boston and comes back every year to the same beach that exists outside of time and away from civilisation, yet is also situated within a country enduring intense violence and poverty. She cynically gives money to a young lover, Legba, in order to feel desirable, aware that everything in Haiti is only an illusion. Cantet’s film deals with one of Western societies’ blind spots: the sexual and emotional hardships endured by ageing women. Without condoning the form of neocolonial sex tourism engaged in by the protagonists, the film allows the subjectivity of ageing women to emerge and be expressed on screen. Still, every character is assigned a binary identity as old or young, White or Black and dominant or dominated, boiling intimacy down to a sordid socio-economic power relationship. Ellen is portrayed as a foreigner on holiday in Haiti. William Brown (2012, 58–59) shows that Rampling’s image as a star has always relied on her representation of a feminine otherness by way of her national origin and her transnational success, and this representation has only become more pronounced with age. Rampling has often personified deviant desires, and for Brown, this series of French films develops this idea by having her represent a threatening form of otherness.

The second pattern situates Rampling’s character within a group of French people while assigning her an unclear identity, which a suggestive line of dialogue associates with an English background (Sous le sable, where she is a professor of English literature; Embrassez qui vous voudrez, where her identity is suggested by her first name, Elizabeth, and her remark about Le Touquet being infested with Britons; Lemming; Le Bal des actrices/All About Actresses [Maïwenn, 2009]; L’Homme aux cercles bleus [Josée Dayan, 2009], a made-for-television film shown on France 2 where, as in the source novel by well-known French crime writer Fred Vargas, her name is Mathilde and another character makes a comment about Queen Matilda of Scotland).⁴ These characters have an exotic side to them, but one that vaguely suggests mystery or even danger, particularly in Lemming, through the expression of desires that are seen as inappropriate for the character’s age.

French productions and especially co-productions have also produced a third trend, consisting of two overlapping subcategories that have taken the latter part of Rampling’s career in a postnational direction. First of all, there are films and series where she plays a character who is French or comes from a European country other than the UK (French in Crime contre l’humanité/The Statement [Norman Jewison, 2003]; Le Dos rouge/Portrait of the Artist [Antoine Barraud, 2014], where she only provides an off-screen voiceover; and the series Kidnapping; Nordic in Melancholia [Lars von Trier, 2011]; Belgian in Hannah; and Italian in Benedetta). These fictions further develop a characteristic already present in her previous French period, where she had played characters identified as French, in Claude Lelouch’s pseudo-fantasy Viva la vie (1984) and more distinctly as figures of French cultural tradition in two television films and a costume drama miniseries: La Femme abandonnée (Edouard Molinaro, 1992) for France 3, where she plays Madame de Beauséant, the figure of Parisian high society from Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot, shown here in her period of decline; in the Franco-German miniseries La Marche de Radetzky (‘Radetzky March’) (Gernot Roll and Axel Corti, 1994) for ORF and France 2, where she is the lieutenant’s mistress; and La Dernière fête (‘The Last Party’) (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1996) for France 3, another fiction depicting the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s short story Story of a Downfall, where she portrays the Marquise de Prie as she loses power. The second subcategory consists of sci-fi films, which have become an increasingly large part of her filmography, transforming her accent and the mute force of her gaze into a generic, dystopian otherness that extends a facet of Rampling’s image that began with the post-apocalyptic Zardoz, where she portrays a sort of ultra-conservative guardian of the law who ends up as a sexually liberated ‘new Eve’. She is a doctor and one of the rare humans in Immortel, ad vitam/Immortal (Enki Bilal, 2004), a high priestess in Babylon A.D. (Fig. 3), a leader of the Templar Elders in Assassin’s Creed and, in Last Words (Jonathan Nossiter, 2020), one of the last human women alive, who dies giving birth to a stillborn child. Her role as a high priestess in the remake of Dune follows this same trend. Rampling almost played the role of Jessica in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s planned Franco-Chilean adaptation of Dune in the 1970s.⁵ In 1989, Enki Bilal also asked her to play the futuristic female lead in his first film, Bunker Palace Hôtel, set in a cold, decaying universe, but she refused because she was suffering from a bout of depression. This is therefore a long-standing aspect of the actress’s image, but it has become more defined as she has aged.

Fig. 3

Babylon A.D. channels Rampling’s dystopian otherness

Through the different stages of her French career, we can observe an evolution in the fluidity of Rampling’s identity, both real and imagined, from a period when she was explicitly or implicitly attached to roles as Englishwomen, mainly in auteur films that reached a relatively broad audience, to a period now dominated by non-English European identities, mainly in European co-productions aimed at popular audiences. Ultimately, her British identity is not central to her image, since this becomes an aspect of her class identity in auteur cinema, and is processed into a generic otherness by sci-fi films that nonetheless retain its basic essence. This essence is clearly revealed by the actress’s ageing, in French cinema as well as in other European films that build on the trend established in France. The common denominator lies in the fantasy of otherness, which is superimposed on her European identity. The exoticism of this identity is a function of Bourdieusian distinction, and thus of recognition (by art cinema, which tacitly endorses it) and exclusion (by mainstream audiences, for whom she embodies threatening antagonists, mainly in works of science fiction). Namely, Rampling’s identity is associated with the dominant classes of old Europe and their attributes of conceit—audible in her accent—decadence, neurosis and even degeneracy (which is already present in her first major roles). Put simply, it is expressed by melancholy, which can sometimes lead to renewal (Sous le sable), sometimes to demise (suicide in Lemming), the end of the world in Melancholia and a joyous apocalypse in Last Words, a Metropolis-like dictatorship in Immortel, inquisition in Assassin’s Creed and Benedetta. As Agnès Peck has aptly observed, ‘Charlotte Rampling excels in this ability to have her own singularity fade into a stream of memory, to merge into the universal’ (Peck 2003, 9).

In interviews, Rampling has frequently mentioned that she is the daughter of an army colonel, Godfrey Rampling, a strict, imposing father who won a gold medal in track at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She points out that she learned French from nuns in a private Catholic school in Fontainebleau while her father was working for NATO. Rampling, who often appears patrician, has almost exclusively played powerful women (surgeon, police captain, author, artist, university professor, Mother Superior), or roles marked by class distinction, such as the bourgeois woman who impresses Karin Viard in Embrassez qui vous voudrez and its sequel. The controversy that likely cost her an Oscar in 2016 may not be unrelated to her embodiment of this type of European identity that she embodies. Ultimately, the expansion of her career, her comeback and transnational success all began with the contemporary regeneration and re-signification of her image in French cinema, particularly in films that were popular and/or received significant media attention, where she is at her most unheimlich, in the ambiguous, double meaning of the term: both unsettlingly odd and strangely familiar.

While other foreign actresses have found a home in French cinema, they have followed different models for doing so. One British example that comes to mind is Kristin Scott-Thomas. The daughter of a Royal Navy pilot, Scott-Thomas studied acting in France, where she had most of her first major roles before moving centripetally towards an international career via two British films, Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) and the British/American co-production The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996). Even though her image has been tinged by a certain strangeness in her French films, this aspect has only come up occasionally and later in her career, as she has grown older, in films like Il y a longtemps que je t’aime/I’ve Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudelle, 2009), Partir/Leaving (Catherine Corsini, 2009), Contre toi/In Your Hands (Lola Doillon, 2010) and Crime d’amour/Love Crime (Alain Corneau, 2010). Rampling, on the other hand, has embodied a threatening or at least mysterious European form of seduction ever since her first roles.

A more interesting comparison can be drawn with another trans-European actress, Romy Schneider. Like Rampling, Schneider got her start in her native country’s own cinema. While Schneider was marked by the bittersweet image of Sissi, the Austrian Empress she famously played, Rampling had more of a sunny, pop image, in the context of Swinging London comedies (The Knack … and How to Get It [Richard Lester, 1965]; Georgy Girl [Silvio Narizzano, 1966]). Schneider made her way across Europe in a centrifugal movement shaped by her work with Luchino Visconti, appearances in auteur cinema and a more serious aspect to her persona, similar to Rampling’s. She did not make her debut in French cinema with the same image, however. Instead, Schneider embodied the idea of European reconciliation in the couple she formed with Alain Delon, a fact that highlights the other important aspect of her image: she was never defined by her off-screen individuality, and her characters almost always met with failure in their quest for emancipation, thus making her an illusory figure of modernity. She was moulded first by her mother, Magda Schneider, herself an actress, who brought her daughter up to become a child star, then by Alain Delon, her engagement to whom allowed her to escape from the grip of her mother and stepfather. He acted as a Pygmalion figure, determining the course of her career at several junctures and giving her the opportunity to meet Visconti; Claude Sautet would become the Pygmalion of the final part of her career. Rampling, however, would assert herself through her own agency: she was only a muse to her husband, the musician Jean-Michel Jarre, which boosted her reputation, and her only continuing collaboration was in late middle age with Ozon, giving her an alter ego in Swimming Pool. From a young age, she established a reputation as a free agent, embodying a repressed European identity, her dark side, in two roles as Holocaust victims (The Damned and The Night Porter) that would go on to haunt her image for the rest of her career and amplify her multiple forms of otherness: she has always turned towards films that allow her a more or less direct form of introspection about her own personal traumas.

‘She has a sense of ghost,’ David Cronenberg has said, even though he has never directed her. ‘That is a beautiful compliment,’ [she replied]. ‘It means that I inhabit a haunted universe. I’ve always had that within me. What can be seen as coldness or distance is just a way of looking at things differently. I’m in another space …’ (Baurez 2016)

Ultimately, if Rampling’s ‘[an]other space’ has in today’s post-Brexit era become a European no man’s land, it is because she has always worked as a cultural gleaner, an eternal exile who has cultivated her own difference from national norms by taking up a European identity and using it as a productive, hybrid cultural space. She has negotiated her way through dialectical shifts both geographical and cultural, between an intimate art cinema and films intended for a broader audience. Each of these films has added to the otherness, built up via multiple moves from country to country, that defines her persona.