Many postwar British filmgoers had their perception of French women shaped by seeing such sophisticated stars as Edwige Feuillère, Danielle Darrieux and Micheline Presle on screen in the 1940s.
Presle, who has died aged 101, specialised in playing “the older woman”, starting while still only in her 20s with Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Diable au Corps (The Devil in the Flesh, 1947), in which a young wife has an affair with a schoolboy (Gérard Philipe). The film of Raymond Radiguet’s precocious semi-autobiographical novel caused outrage in some quarters for its sympathetic portrayal of lovers cuckolding a soldier away at war; in it Presle hinted at a breaking heart beneath the glittering surface of a woman of the world.
