Background
Leonie Bathiat (Arletty) was born on May 15, 1898 in Courbevoie. Daughter of Michel Bathiat and Marie (nee Dautreix) Bathiat.
Leonie Bathiat (Arletty) was born on May 15, 1898 in Courbevoie. Daughter of Michel Bathiat and Marie (nee Dautreix) Bathiat.
Long before movies, Arletty had worked in a munitions factory and as a fashion model. She posed for Braque and Matisse; she became a pacifist when her lover was killed in the First World War; and she played a wide range of roles on the stage.
She never made a lot of films, and she had a droll, distant air in many of them. Even her most famous parts, as in Le Jour se Lève (39, Marcel Carné), are actually very slight. And the fact that she is the most sane, least depressed character in Le Jour se Lève sets her farther apart. She is redundant to the plot, there only to explain how wicked fules Bern' is and to afford Gabin some passing solace. She is admirably dry, without ever sacrificing amusement or tenderness. Her enigmatic, fatalistic warmth was better employed as Garance—the spirit of popular theatre—in Les Enfants du Paradis (44, Camé). Even there, Arletty was ready to be like a leaf blown on the winds of romance. At forty-five, she seemed like a very wise girl still.
She did not make films until 1930: Un Chien qui Rapporte (Jean Choux). It was a few years before Carné and Sacha Guitry promoted her to leading parts: Pension Mimosas (35, Jacques Feyder); Faisons un Rêve (36, Guitry); Les Perles de la Couronne (37, Guitry); Désiré (38, Guitry); Hôtel du Nord (38, Carné); Fric-Frac (39, Claude Autant-Lara); Madame Sans-Gêne (4L Roger Richebé); and Les Visiteurs du Soir (42, Camé).
During the Second World War, she had a love affair with a Luftwaffe officer, and thus she was jailed as a collaborator when Les Enfants du Paradis opened—life competing with Jacques Prévert s taste for irony.
She was in Carnés uncompleted La Fleur de l'Age in 1947, and she had triumphs on the stage in A Streetcar Named Desire and Huis-Clos. But she made fewer films: LAmour Madame (52, Ciilles Grangier); Le Grand Jen (53, Robert Siod- mak); Huis-Clos (54, Jacqueline Audrv); with Gabin again in L’Airde Paris (54, Came); and La Gamberge (62, Norbert Carbonnaux).
In 1966, she was stricken with blindness. But in 1971, she wrote a book of memoirs, La Defense, and lived to be ninety-four.