New Wave and Cinema Debut
Cinema, through the intermediary of Robert Bresson, had sought her out beginning in 1943, to play in Les Anges du péché. Bresson had hired her without knowing that she was an actress, as he was looking for non-professionals for his film... In 1948, she played the role of Édith de Berg in the cinematic adaptation of L'Aigle à deux têtes by Cocteau beside Feuillère and Jean Marais.
In 1955, Agnès Varda, then a photographer at the TNP, directed her first film, one of the first belonging to the New Wave. Varda remembers Silvia Monfort in La Pointe Courte: "Curious and a pioneer by nature, she threw herself into the project with delight and discipline. I really think she was happy to fight for a cinema of the future."
Henceforth separated from Maurice Clavel, Silvia Monfort shared her life with and participated in the films of director Jean-Paul Le Chanois. Despite her having an arm in a plaster cast, he insisted that she play a Polish prisoner beside François Périer and Pierre Fresnay in a film inspired by a true story, Les Évadés. This film met with great popular success in 1955. She then played beside Jean Gabin and Nicole Courcel in Le Cas du docteur Laurent, a film advocating painless childbirth (1957), and then in an obscure film of Le Chanois dealing with parent-child relations, Par-dessus le mur (1961). In two films dealing with social conditions, she was the unforgettable Eponine of Les Misérables, alongside Gabin and Bourvil (1958), and then the Gypsy girl Myrtille in Mandrin, bandit gentilhomme beside Georges Rivière and Georges Wilson. This film wrapped up her cinematic career and her relationship with Le Chanois in 1962.
Read more about this topic: Silvia Monfort
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