A life ruined by Last Tango in Paris: Who is Maria Schneider?

After the film was banned in many countries due to its lovemaking scenes, Schneider took part in important productions, but it is also true that the film had devastating effects on Schneider's mental health.

The most important production in Schneider's career was Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece called 'The Passenger'. The actress last starred in 2008's 'Cliente'.

Who is Maria Schneider?

Maria Schneider died in a hospital room in Paris on Thursday, February 3, 2011, at the age of 59. 7 days later, according to her will, her ashes were scattered into the Atlantic Ocean over a cape named "Rock of the Virgin" in the city of Biarritz in South-West France.

Maria Schneider, her full name is Marie-Christine Schneider in the civil registry, was born on March 27, 1952, from the extramarital affair of Daniel Gélin, one of the famous French actors of that period, and Marie-Christine Schneider, a photo model of Romanian origin.

When Schneider got pregnant from him, father Gélin, who was married to actress Danièle Delorme, did not care at all about this baby carrying her blood in his veins. On the other hand, Mrs. Delorme, who soon learns about the forbidden relationship between the two and the existence of the baby, leaves her husband and immediately divorces him.

Maria-Hélène Schneider (27 March 1952 – 3 February 2011), known professionally as Maria Schneider, was a French actress. In 1972, at the age of 19, she starred opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, but being traumatised by being raped in a scene and hounded by unsavoury publicity negatively affected her subsequent career. Although Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) showcased her abilities, a reputation for walking out of films mid-production resulted in her becoming unwelcome in the industry. However, she re-established stability in her personal and professional life in the early 1980s, and became an advocate for equality and improving the conditions actresses worked under. She continued acting in film and TV until a few years before she died in 2011 after a long illness.

Maria, who was the fruit of a daily relationship that had no emotional dimension, had the opportunity to see her father three times in her life, even though they lived in the same city and later worked in the same industry. In response to his insensitivity towards her, she would choose to carry her mother's surname, not her biological father's, when she came of age. Moreover, as a natural result of her never-ending anger towards her father, she would not attend the funeral of Daniel Gélin, who passed away in 2002.

When the Marxist Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, who had a good breakthrough with his film "The Conformist" in 1970, discovered her, Maria was only 17 years old, a young actress candidate who had only played supporting roles in three or five films.

Bertolucci decided to cast this immature girl, who had a striking beauty but was completely abandoned in the industry, in the role of Jeanne in "Last Tango in Paris", the script of which he was then putting the finishing touches.

The fact that the man on the other side of this "sick love story" will be played by Marlon Brando, one of the living legends of American cinema at that time, gave Bertolucci the opportunity to make all kinds of whims in the selection of actors.

The wolf filmmaker, who boastfully describes himself as an "atheist" on every platform, finally decided to portray this character, Maria, who had just come of age and was wandering around in the industry alone, with the seductiveness of the name Brando in the market, despite all the perverse approaches contained in the script he wrote jointly with Franco Arcalli. He convinced me.

"Last Tango in Paris", which tells the relationship between the American sexopath businessman Paul and a young French girl who gradually turns into his sexual slave in a house where she is completely isolated from life, is as Bertolucci expected from the very beginning, and the sensations it creates multiply its cinematic value. It would turn into a brilliant commercial product.

As soon as the film was released, it was either banned or shown with significant cuts in many countries, including his own.

Just before a scene of the film shot with a direct "rape" approach, she says, "There is something bad in this story that hurts me. When she said, "I want to call my manager and my lawyer and talk to them," they suppressed the young woman's reactions by telling her that "it was just a movie and not to make a big deal out of it."

Despite all the traumatic experiences she went through, young Maria helplessly submitted to the various manias tried on her by Bertolucci, who did not believe in the phenomenon called "morality" in human beings and insulted her at every opportunity.

While the film caused havoc in the European continent and made both Bertolucci and the producer-distributor team rich in a short time, Schneider starred in this “sado-maso porn”, which was enhanced with good music, cinematography, and Brando's presence. She was incapable of being seen in public. She started using heavy anti-depressants because she was treated like a "prostitute rented from a brothel" for months on that despotic set, where the director and Brando were in full cooperation.

These sedative tablets, which she consumed by the handful, would later be followed by cannabis, marijuana, heroin, and finally cocaine.

Maria's door would be knocked on by Italian porn director Tinto Brass, this time for a production much worse than the previous one.

Brass was eager to include Schneider among the leading actors of the hard-porn level movie called "Caligula", which would supposedly tell the life of the Roman emperor Caligula, who was known for his perverted behavior.

The young woman would portray Drusilla, Caligula's sister, in this historical story. However, Schneider, who had not yet overcome the traumas caused by "Last Tango in Paris", began to rebel more and more when she saw the disgusting additions that the director made to the film shortly after the shooting began.

As a character who had an incestuous relationship with her emperor brother, Drusilla almost did not even have the opportunity to appear dressed throughout the film! After shooting a few less embarrassing scenes, Maria had a nervous breakdown on the set and was admitted to a mental hospital in Rome. She was only 22 years old, but her soul and body were already as tired as those of a 50-year-old person.

In the following days, when it became clear that the film could not be completed with him, director Brass handed over this role to British actress Teresa Ann Savoy, with great displeasure, and Schneider withdrew from the project completely.

Every director knocking on her door tried to use her as an "appetizing sexual object" in stories focused on "pornography", which was simply driving Maria crazy. The emotional depression caused by this situation would lead him to become addicted to all kinds of drugs throughout the 1970s and to attempt suicide several times in between.

During that painful period, the only director who treated him with respect and gave him a decent role was Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the true masters of Italian cinema. Antonioni, as the first filmmaker to choose Schneider based on her "acting" rather than her "hips", gave her a very important chance in the 1975 film "The Passenger", starring Jack Nicholson. With that film, in which the young woman put forth her best, she added another bright link to the filmography of this great director.

Although Maria desperately searched for a second Antonioni throughout the next part of her career, she never found one.

At the end of the 1970s, while she was struggling with drugs, depression, and suicide attempts, his deteriorating mental health would lead him to be with not only men but also women.

In an interview with her, she admitted this situation honestly, saying, "I don't know when it came out, but I am bisexual now."

Afterwards, the entire 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s were almost just a time for this prematurely exhausted woman, who sincerely devoted herself to cinema and struggled to create something much better than "Tango" or "Caligula". It turned into the "lost years" in which she was remembered for her nude photographs and daring film scenes. During the same period, although she received treatment many times to get rid of alcohol-drug addiction and frequently recurring suicidal tendencies, she lived an extremely troubled life, both materially and spiritually, in which she sometimes got better, sometimes got worse again, but could never keep up with the rhythm of her early youth.