Geneviève Page, the alluring French actress who starred in such films as Belle de Jour, El Cid and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, died Friday. She was 97.
Page died at her home in Paris, her granddaughter, actress Zoé Guillemaud, told the AFP news agency.
In a career of more than 50 years, Page appeared in other notable films including Fanfan la Tulip (1952); Foreign Intrigue (1956), opposite Robert Mitchum; The Silken Affair (1956), with David Niven; John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966); Mayerling (1968), directed by Terence Young; and Charles Vidor’s Song Without End (1960), where the director died mid-shoot and was replaced by George Cukor.
In 1967, Spanish director Luis Buñuel cast Page as Madame Anais, the owner and operator of the high-class brothel in Belle de Jour, an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel.
The film centers on Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), whose sexless marriage pushes her into prostitution — but only between the hours of 2 and 5 p.m. As a result, Page nicknames her “Belle de Jour,” roughly translated to “Beauty of the Day.”
Madame Anais is a demanding, no-nonsense woman, with a hint of attraction toward Deneuve’s character, and the film features a very brief kiss between the two. Page received a supporting actress nomination from the National Society of Film Critics for her work, and the drama won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
A year earlier, Page had a brief role in Grand Prix (1966) as the estranged wife who refuses to grant Ferrari driver Jean-Pierre Sarti (Yves Montand) a divorce.
The Italian-American medieval epic El Cid (1961) saw Page perfectly cast as the scheming Princess Urraca. Starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, the film was a huge spectacle, running more than three hours with an overture and intermission and costing $6 million to make. “A Great Adventure, A Great Love Story, Great Stars,” the trailer proclaimed.
At the start of the 1970s, director Billy Wilder released The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Stephens as the famed detective and Colin Blakely portraying Dr. Watson. Page plays a mysterious Belgian client who asks Holmes to find her missing engineer husband.
Production of the film was halted after a 30-foot Loch Ness Monster model, built for a key sequence in the film, sank in the lake while being towed behind a boat.
