Marie-France Pisier (10 May 194424 April 2011) was a French actress, screenwriter, and director. She appeared in numerous films of the French New Wave, and twice earned the national César Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Early life
Pisier was born on 10 May 1944 in Dalat (now Vietnam), where her father was serving as a colonial official in French Indochina. Her younger brother, Gilles Pisier, is a mathematician and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Her sister, political scientist Evelyn, was the first wife of Bernard Kouchner, a French politician and the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières. The family moved to Paris when Marie-France was 12 years old.
Career
As a teenager, Pisier began acting with amateur theater groups. Years later, Pisier would make her screen acting debut for director François Truffaut in his 1962 film Antoine and Colette. She had a brief, but incendiary, romance with the older, married Truffaut. Despite its end, she later appeared in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968) and Love on the Run (L'Amour en fuite, 1979), the fifth and final film in Truffaut's series about the character Antoine Doinel. Pisier was credited as a co-writer of the screenplay.
Pisier later collaborated on the screenplay to Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau, 1974); she also played a significant supporting role in the film. Later in the same year, she had a role in Luis Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty. She was briefly in a relationship with actor Timothy Dalton.
Pisier later on resided in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, Var, and was married to Thierry Funck-Brentano. The couple had two children: a son, Mathieu, and a daughter, Iris. She was survived by her sister Évelyne, brother Gilles, and both children.