My Cousin Maria Schneider
A Memoir
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“A beautiful eulogy and a much-needed corrective” (The New York Times)—a love letter to Maria Schneider, the 1970s movie starlet who catapulted to fame in the controversial film Last Tango in Paris—only to live the rest of her life plagued by scandal, as told from the perspective of her adoring younger cousin.
The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later.
To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny.
Unsentimental and moving, My Cousin Maria Schneider is a love letter to a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and a powerful story of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and journalist Schneider (Do Not Go Crazy) pays tribute to her cousin, late French actor Maria Schneider, in this poignant memoir. Before Maria died of cancer at 58, she concluded she'd "had a happy life," dumbfounding her cousin, who witnessed her immense troubles firsthand. For much of this slim volume, Schneider recounts that pain: as a young child, she walked in on Maria shooting heroin, and characterizes Maria's upbringing as "a child who grew up invisible to the very people whose affection needed most." She also reflects on Maria's infamous sex scene opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, which came to be widely viewed as "cinematic rape." (Referring to director Bernardo Bertolucci's defense of the controversial sequence, Schneider writes, "To him, you were merely collateral damage.") There's brightness, though, too, as when Schneider recounts Maria's stints as a muse for artists including photographer Nan Goldin, singer Patti Smith, and fellow actor Brigitte Bardot, who paid for Maria's funeral. Schneider writes dispassionately though not without affection, providing a blunt perspective on her complicated relationship with her cousin, a woman haunted by addiction and exploitation who sipped champagne until the end. The result is a bittersweet and gritty salute to a misunderstood screen legend.
