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:
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