| María Casarès | |
| Birth Name: | María Victoria Casares y Pérez |
| Birth Date: | 1922 11, df=y |
| Birth Place: | A Coruña, Galicia, Spain |
| Death Place: | Alloue, Poitou-Charentes, France |
| Alma Mater: | Paris Conservatoire |
| Occupation: | Actress |
| Father: | Santiago Casares Quiroga |
María Victoria Casares y Pérez (21 November 1922 – 22 November 1996) was a Spanish-born French actress and one of the most distinguished stars of the French stage and cinema. She was credited in France as Maria Casarès.[1]
Casares was born María Victoria Casares y Pérez in A Coruña, Galicia, the daughter of Santiago Casares Quiroga, a minister in Manuel Azaña's government and Prime Minister of Spain, and of Gloria Pérez. She was a volunteer in Madrid hospitals already at age fourteen. Her father was a member of the Republican government so at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936), the family was forced to flee Spain. Her father went to London, but she and her mother sought refuge in Paris.
There, María attended the Victor Duruy school, where she learned French and was befriended by a teacher and his Spanish wife, who inspired her to go into the theatre. After graduation, she took voice classes with René Simon. She enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire, where she won First Prize for tragedy and Second Prize for comedy.
In July 1942, she auditioned for Marcel Herrand who engaged her for his Théâtre des Mathurins. There, over the course of the next three years, she appeared in several plays including, Deirdre of the Sorrows by J. M. Synge, The Master Builder by Ibsen, Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding) by Albert Camus (with whom she would later have a passionate affair), and an important premiere, Fédérico, after Prosper Mérimée, with Gérard Philipe.
She began to appear in films. Her first film role was in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du paradis (1945), one of the great classics of French cinema. She also made Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) for Robert Bresson, La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1948) for Christian-Jaque, co-starring Gérard Philipe. For Cocteau, she played Death in his Orphée (1950) with Jean Marais and François Périer and in his Testament d'Orphée (Testament of Orpheus) (1960).
In 1989, she was nominated for the César Award for Best Supporting Actress in La Lectrice.
From 1952 onward, although she continued to appear in occasional films, she devoted herself mainly to the stage. She joined the Festival d'Avignon, the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre National Populaire under the leadership of Jean Vilar. Before her, no one actor or actress of foreign origin had ever played at Comédie-Française. She toured extensively throughout the world, appearing in the great classics of French theatre, including, in 1958, Corneille's Le Cid, Victor Hugo's Marie Tudor and Marivaux's Le Triomphe de l'Amour (The Triumph of Love) on Broadway.
Casares took French nationality in 1975 and three years later married André Schlesser, an actor known professionally as Dade, who had been her longtime companion and theatrical co-star.[2]
She published her autobiography, Résidente privilégiée (Privileged Resident) in 1980, in which she described her 16-year affair with Albert Camus.[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] The couple never married, but their extensive correspondence, first published in France in late 2017, lasted from 1944, with a five-year break to 1949, when they again had a chance meeting when their passion was rekindled until the end of Camus' life.[8] [9] [10] [11] She starred in a number of Albert Camus's plays and often threatened to end their stormy affair over his refusal to leave Francine Faure.[12] [13]
The actress died of colon cancer at her country house, Château de La Vergne, in the village of Alloue in Poitou-Charentes, on the day after her 74th birthday.[14] [15] She bequeathed the property to the village. Today, the Domaine de la Vergne is a residence for artists and a setting for performances.