Last Tango in Paris' Actress Maria Schneider Has Died

When you're a young, beautiful and largely unknown actress, one of the biggest decisions you'll have to face is whether or not you're willing to appear nude in a movie that could launch your career. There's no right or wrong answer to that question -- each actress has to decide that for herself -- but in the case of Maria Schneider, who died this morning in Paris at the age of 58, she said yes. The film was "Last Tango in Paris." And it changed her life -- for better and for worse.
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The French actress was only 19 when Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci cast her in the movie opposite the much more experienced and acclaimed Marlon Brando. (He was also much older: 48.) Released at the end of 1972, "Last Tango in Paris" was an instant scandal, telling the unlikely story of two strangers -- an American widower (Brando) and an engaged French woman (Schneider) -- who meet in Paris and decide to have anonymous sexual trysts with

each other in an empty apartment. (How anonymous? The widower insists that they not reveal their names or anything about themselves.) Catching the film at its premiere at the New York Film Festival, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael memorably rhapsodized in her review, declaring that "Last Tango" had "altered the face of an art form ... This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies." Sexually explicit in a way movies never were before and have only rarely been since, "Last Tango in Paris" was really about alienation and the disconnect between sex and love, but its legacy has ended up being that it was banned throughout the world and that, yes, it

contains one of the most shocking love scenes of all time. We won't show you that, but the film's original trailer gives a decent hint of the movie's libidinous, artsy trappings: