Emmanuelle Riva: 1927-2017 | Features

Riva never married or had children, and she only entered into her profession at the age of 26 after a life in a rural area of France, where she trained to be a seamstress; her father was a sign painter, and her family opposed her decision to go into acting. Riva had begun to get work in the theater when she was cast in “Hiroshima mon amour,” where her voice was often heard on the soundtrack softly intoning lines of narration and anguished pillow talk written by Marguerite Duras. Riva was up for the task of making the repetitions in Duras’s writing land in just the right incantatory way, and her face told its own sad story in the flashback scenes.

“Hiroshima mon amour” was much discussed, analyzed and sometimes derided in its time, and Riva is its figurehead. She had a face that was somehow both cold and warm, and most beautiful when she was feeling most sorrowful. Her eyes were spaced far apart and they seemed to be both penetrating and distant.

Riva was a major screen presence because she always seems to be trying to hold conventional emotions back from the camera while helplessly revealing all kinds of complex and fleeting unconventional thoughts and feelings. She was a performer who became an emblem for an age of anxiety, and she was too knowing and too melancholy a sensibility to ever become a popular star.

In the interviews she did around the time of “Amour,” Riva said that she often turned down mainstream work that she had no feeling for, and so sometimes as she got older her offers to act were not plentiful. From the start of her career, Riva’s presence in a film signaled high intentions and deep anguish. She had lofty standards and she kept to them, accepting parts in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Kapò” (1960), which was set in a concentration camp, and Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Léon Morin, Priest” (1961), in which she played a widow who falls in love with a priest played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. And then Riva gave perhaps her finest performance for Georges Franju in “Thérèse Desqueyroux” (1962), for which she won best actress at the Venice Film Festival.

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