The actor Yvonne Furneaux, who has died aged 98, considered her decision to adopt a French screen name as the “great mistake” of her career.
Having been born to British parents in Roubaix, near Lille, as Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd, she adopted her mother’s birth name when she began performing. “This, combined with my rather continental appearance, has always worked against me in getting British roles,” she told the New York Daily News in 1958.
Not that her CV was shabby. When she was cast in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), she had already been directed by Peter Brook in The Beggar’s Opera (1953), starring Laurence Olivier, and by Michelangelo Antonioni in Le Amiche (1955), where she was one of the five girlfriends who lend that film its title.
She later played the more stable, sexually uninhibited older sister to Catherine Deneuve, who disintegrates mentally in their shared west London flat, in Roman Polanski’s nightmarish Repulsion (1965), and starred with Anthony Perkins in Claude Chabrol’s thriller The Champagne Murders (1967).
Before Fellini called, she was best known for playing the dual roles of a 4,000-year-dead princess and the wife of a British archaeologist in the Hammer horror film The Mummy (1959), with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. She displayed, said John Baxter, “a considerable ability to cringe, flinch and moan”.
La Dolce Vita catapulted her to international stardom. She played Emma, the understandably aggrieved, insecure live-in girlfriend of the philandering journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni). In her first scene, she is discovered by him at their home after having taken an overdose. Emma later accompanies him on various trips, including one to a village outside Rome where children claim to have seen the Virgin Mary, and another to the home of a friend and his family, a visit that prefaces a tragedy.
In their most dramatic scene, Emma and Marcello quarrel late at night while parked on wasteland. She declares her love for him, protests that he is unable to love anyone, and asks: “What have I done to be treated this way? Not even a dog gets treated like this”. He responds by decrying her “aggressive, sticky, maternal love” and accusing her of trying to turn him into a “spineless worm”.
The scene is rendered eerie and tense by the prowling camera, the low, tremulous hum of Nino Rota’s score, and the sudden visual desolation in a film that is otherwise brimming with detail and vitality. The argument escalates into violence – as Marcello tries to throw Emma out of the car, she bites his hand, then he slaps her – and only ends when he drives off alone. As the sky lightens, she is seen clutching wild flowers picked from the roadside. Marcello zooms into view, and she gets into the car without a word. By the end of the movie, she has apparently been forgotten by him.
Fellini adored Furneaux’s performance, and speculated later that she was overlooked in favour of Anita Ekberg and Nadia Gray in the same film because her character “was complete, with so little room for further speculation, while the other two, who remained mysterious, were thus more intriguing”.
Furneaux’s experience with Polanski was less edifying. The director cultivated a tense atmosphere on set, provoking his actors into anger at him and each other. Furneaux felt especially victimised, and pleaded with the executive producer Michael Klinger: “Tell that little bastard to leave me alone.”
“Why are you giving the girl such a hard time?” Klinger asked the film-maker. “Michael, I know she’s a nice girl,” Polanski replied. “She’s too bloody nice. She’s supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch.”
She was born to Amy (nee Furneaux) and Joseph, who worked for Lloyds Bank in Roubaix. The family moved to the UK when she was 11. She read modern languages at Oxford University and later enrolled at Rada before working widely in theatre.
In January 1953, she was part of a Vogue magazine spread entitled the Young Look in the Theatre, for which she was photographed by Norman Parkinson alongside Natalie Wood, Jill Bennett and others. An adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae in 1953 was the first of three films she made in quick succession with Errol Flynn; the others were Crossed Swords (1954) and The Dark Avenger (1955).
Prior to their release, the Manchester Evening News described her speciality as “bold, black-eyed minxes who love not wisely but too well” while confiding that she was “almost embarrassingly unminxlike” in person. “I’m so nervous,” she told the paper. “I always think this part is going to be my last.”
Ray Milland directed and co-starred with her in Lisbon (1956), the first Hollywood production shot in Portugal. She had already appeared in her first Italian film, the historical swashbuckler The Prince with the Red Mask, in 1955, but went on to make many more in the wake of La Dolce Vita, including the wartime comedy Some Like It Cold and Via Margutta AKA Run with the Devil (both 1960), a story of young bohemian life.
In 1962, she married the cinematographer and former pilot Jacques Natteau, whom she met on the set of The Count of Monte Cristo (1961), in which she starred opposite Louis Jordan. They lived together in Paris and in a small castle 30 miles outside Rome.
She retired from acting in the early 1970s, making the briefest of comebacks with Donald Pleasence in the lamentable comedy Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie (1984).
Jacques died in 2007. She is survived by their son, Nicholas.
• Yvonne Furneaux (Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd), actor, born 11 May 1926; died 5 July 2024
