When Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she mentioned no. It’s not that she wasn’t within the late French actor, whose life was so horribly outlined and dominated by Final Tango in Paris. Nor was it that she felt too near the business to deal with the life story of such a tragic determine. “The alternative,” she says, chatting with me from Vancouver, the place she is filming the supernatural drama collection Riverdale. “I felt my expertise as an actor would solely convey extra to the undertaking. As a result of I really feel like I understood her.” It was simply that she initially didn’t have time. Then the pandemic hit.
At first of our video name, her digital camera isn’t working. It doesn’t matter, I say: simply inform me what you appear to be. “I don’t need to try this,” she says, drily. Then her face seems: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 because it was within the mid-80s when her profession took off, but in addition relaxed, considerate, bespectacled. She appears to be like like a movie star taking part in an instructional who was in the midst of studying one thing extra attention-grabbing, however is affected person sufficient to interrupt off to speak to me for a bit.
She takes up Schneider’s story, the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie and its notorious rape scene. “She was on board for lots of it. I really feel like she personified the time [the film was released in 1972]: she was free, she was bisexual, she was actually comfortable to be a part of one thing that was daring. They only went the additional step that they didn’t have to go. The movie might have been daring and provocative with out that. She ought to have been capable of consent.”
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Maria Schneider in 1985. {Photograph}: Neville Marriner/Each day Mail/Shutterstock
Schneider was 19 once they shot the movie. Bertolucci didn’t inform her the plot till simply earlier than filming: that Marlon Brando’s character was going to anally rape her’s. “Though there was no precise penetration, he arrange a rape, as a result of she didn’t consent to that,” she says. “And he mentioned: ‘That was what I wished. I wished the response of a lady, not of an actress.’ And that’s not proper.”
Bertolucci’s informal denigration of Schneider – she couldn’t presumably act humiliated; he needed to guarantee that she was humiliated – makes it onerous to take critically any of the penitence he expressed in later years. “I believe he knew he needed to atone, to say one thing,” says Ringwald. “So he did, however in the event you see his totally different interviews, his story adjustments. I really feel like he mentioned what he felt he was alleged to say.”
The crowning injustice just isn’t that Bertolucci and Brando made a fortune from the movie, and Schneider little or no, however that she ended up because the punchline of the piece, all of the innuendo loaded on her. It eclipsed the remainder of her profession, in a approach that it didn’t anybody else’s. “I really feel like I knew Maria Schneider initially simply by ‘butter’ [which Brando’s character uses as a lubricant],” she says. “As a youngster, after I thought of that movie, that’s all I thought of. I didn’t know something about her different work, or her as an individual.”
Years after Final Tango, Ringwald met Bertolucci when she was connected to The Queen’s Gambit and he was lined as much as direct it (the co-creator of the Netflix collection, Allan Scott, initially wished to make it as a movie). Translating this work has made her relieved afresh that the film by no means got here off. But having been in showbiz since 1978 – she had her first stage function when she was 10, having already recorded a Dixieland jazz album together with her father, a jazz pianist – Ringwald has had her personal brushes with “the opposite Weinsteins”.
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She wrote about this within the New Yorker in 2017, at the beginning of the #MeToo motion. “After I was 13, a 50-year-old crew member informed me that he would educate me to bounce, after which proceeded to push in opposition to me with an erection. After I was 14, a married movie director caught his tongue in my mouth on set.” As soon as, she complained to her agent about an audition by which she was pressured to put on a canine collar; he laughed and informed her to reserve it for her memoirs.