Claude Jade - The Late 1960s in Film

The Late 1960s in Film

Jade starred in Alfred Hitchcock's late film Topaz (1969), as Michèle Picard, a secret agent's anxious daughter, married to a reporter (Michel Subor). Recommended to Hitchcock by Truffaut, she was 19 years old when cast, with Dany Robin playing her mother. Hitchcock said he chose the two actresses to provide glamor, and later quipped, "Claude Jade is a rather quiet young lady, but I wouldn't guarantee about her behavior in a taxi". Jade recounted that they "talked in a Paris hotel about cooking, and I gave him my recipe for soufflé and told him I liked Strangers on a Train, and that was that." Hitchcock said she resembled his former star Grace Kelly, and in France she was a younger Danielle Darrieux. Some of her scenes were deleted and restored for the director's cut of Topaz in 1999. Topaz was Jade's only Hollywood film. Universal Pictures offered her a seven-year contract, which she turned down reportedly because she preferred to work in French. {{}}

Director Tony Richardson's film Nijinsky (1970), based on a screenplay by Edward Albee, was canceled in its early stages by producer Albert Broccoli. It had starred Jade as Vaslav Nijinsky's wife, alongside Rudolf Nureyev as Nijinsky and Paul Scofield as his lover Sergei Diaghilev. Truffaut's later Bed and Board contains a reference to Nureyev.

She also starred in Édouard Molinaro's My Uncle Benjamin (Mon oncle Benjamin, 1969) alongside Jacques Brel as his fiancée Manette, who refuses his advances until he produces a marriage contract and who escapes with him and the end when Manette realizes she prefers happiness to a marriage contract after all.

She also had a leading role as Linda in a modern The Count of Monte Cristo-Adaptation, Sous le signe de Monte Cristo (Under the Sign of Montecristo) by André Hunebelle. Her career continued in Belgium, where she played a young English teacher who is fatally intrigued by a murderer (Gérard Barray) in the 1969 film The Witness. Also in 1969 she starred in a television adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by Jean-Christophe Averty. {{}}