Actresses: The Jades’ Apprentice

Once upon a movie screen, semiliterate blondes could make U.S. men oooo, whistle, and squirm. Childlike smiles and bulging blouses suggested an irresistible, infantile heaven. But those were only growth pains. Now that the country has matured into world leadership, American men go to the movies to see not girls but women. This has even become the epoch of the opulent jade, all the Melina Mercouris and Jeanne Moreaus, whose frank stares suggest a fully ripened hell and provoke an uncontrollable urge to total ruin.

Austria’s Romy Schneider wants to be a jade too. She is only 24. She has a neat little nose, powder-blue eyes, and a pixy grin. She is real real cute. “God, I hate that word,” she says. For years, she was repeatedly cast in German films more or less as Shirley Tempelhof, the cardboard princess. Determinedly, she has changed all that. Last week in London, dressed in tights and high black stockings, she began work in Carl Foreman’s The Victors as a cabaret violinist turned whore, playfully kicking up her heels and pulling her tights smooth over her alert backside. Spurred by competition, she may create the greatest whore since the fall of the Ptolomies. Mercouri and Moreau are in The Victors as well.

Gaiety & Repudiation. To reach this moment, she has had to shed more than the memory of her early career. She was born in Vienna before World War II, when the city was still trying to be gay. Her mother, Magda Schneider, was a weepy, waltzy actress who was the Jeanette MacDonald of prewar Austria. Her father, Wolf Albach-Retty, was a celebrated actor, and is still a staple of the Vienna Volkstheater. Now divorced, the couple in those days had a retreat at Berchtesgaden, where Romy (a contraction of Rose-Marie) was raised by grandparents. There she playacted alone before her mother’s mirror in the fairy-tale house among the snow-laden Bavarian firs.

When she was 15, she acted with her mother in her first movie. She could have gone on in German films forever, but at 19, she went to Paris and found something more to her liking. She converted herself into a Frenchwoman so thoroughly that today when German reporters ask her questions in German, she answers in French—or in her more recently acquired English.

Silence & Ambivalence. The professional transition that prepared her to bat in the same boudoir with Mercouri and Moreau began with the part of the pretty young wife of the dissolute count in Luchino Visconti’s segment of Boccaccio ’70. But the role still had a touch of the old sentimentality in it, since Director Visconti had her cry while she was collecting money from her husband for granting him his marital consortium. Orson Welles has presumably buffed her up further as the nymphomaniac Leni in his still unreleased version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Now she is undoubtedly ready to win her permanent place in a woman’s world.

French Actor Alain Delon has helped too. He was her co-star in a 1961 Paris production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. They have been man and mistress for four years. She calls him “my engaged husband.” Fond of the conjugal we, she likes to say “we have 3,000 records,” or “we both love dogs,” or “we are getting married after Christmas, probably in the country, or in the snow.” Delon preserves snowy silence.

As an actress, Romy has developed an almost military sense of profession. But she has little patience for schooled techniques. “What is the Method?” she says. “I don’t know what it is. Acting is acting. You know what to do. My mother always quoted a director who said, ‘Damn it, don’t think, act!’ ” But in spite of herself, Romy Schneider thinks a great deal about her work, particularly about how difficult it is “to be a real human being in life” as well as on the stage. “Yes,” she finishes with an ambivalent grin, “to make love well is hardest of all.”