Partner Colette de
Jouvenel, Susan Sontag
Nicole Mathilde Stéphanie Stéphane (born Baroness Nicole de Rothschild, 27 May 1923 – 13 March 2007) was a French actress, producer and director.
Colette de
Jouvenel, also known as Bel-Gazou, was the daughter of French writer
Colette and her second husband, Henri de Jouvenel. She had a relationship with Nicole Stéphane. When Colette came to realise that her own daughter, Bel-Gazou, was having
relationships with other women, she was strongly disapproving.
In the early 1970s, Stéphane was the lover of the American writer and critic
Susan Sontag.[3]
The elder of the two daughters of Baron James-Henri Nathaniel Charles Léopold de Rothschild (1896-1984) and his first wife, Claude Andrée Stéphanie Marie Dupont (1904-1964), Nicole Stéphane was a member of the Rothschild banking family of France. Baron de Rothschild was the eldest brother of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, owner of the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild vineyards. He also was a distant cousin of Baron Guy de Rothschild, who formerly headed the Rothschild family bank in Paris. A native of Paris, Baron de Rothschild lived in France, where he kept an apartment in Paris and a home and stables in Compiegne, 45 miles northeast of the French capital. He was Mayor of Compiegne from 1935 to 1940 and again from 1945 to 1947.
Nicole Stéphane's immediate family was deeply immersed in the arts. Her paternal grandfather, Baron Henri de Rothschild, was a playwright and theatrical producer who wrote under the names Charles des Fontaines and André Pascal and owned Théâtre Antoine and Théâtre Pigalle. Her first cousin Philippine de Rothschild was an actress with the Comédie-Française, using the name Philippine Pascal. And her father's brother, the vintner Philippe de Rothschild, wrote plays, owned theatres and produced films.[1]
Stéphane joined the army during the Second World War, and was briefly imprisoned in Spain in 1942 after crossing the Pyrenées while she was trying to join the Free French. She was also a liaison agent in Germany. As an actress, she is best known for her role in two films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Silence de la mer (1949) and Les Enfants terribles (1950).
Her final film as an actress was the film Carve Her Name with Pride (1958). Her acting career was cut short by a car accident. She reoriented herself towards production, helping in particular Georges Franju and Jean-Pierre Melville. Among her production credits was Swann in Love (1984), an adaptation of the first novel in
Marcel Proust's cycle Remembrance of Things Past that starred Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti. She was also honoured as a member of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France.[2]
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