The day has not yet dawned on Rome and it is already hot. A very young girl is dozing on her bed. She wears only a thin, short nightgown. She jumps up, straightens up, sits down, hugging her knees to her and wrapping her arms around them. His eyes are lost towards a mysterious elsewhere. Fine drops of sweat run down her bare skin. She has just had an erotic dream. We hear, played on a Hammond organ, music by Piero Piccioni. We are in 1960. It is the beginning of teenage girls, by Alberto Lattuada. Catherine Spaak has just made, at the age of 15, an unforgettable entry into the cinema.
Later, to a sublime air of variety, Arrivederci, by Umberto Bindi, the camera will follow her lovingly, in a state of grace, in a Roman café, leaning pensively on the jukebox, then going in search of a telephone token. Lattuada had wanted for a while to turn the one who was the daughter of his friend, screenwriter Charles Spaak, with whom he had worked on The Boarder, in 1954. The man, it is said, was, for a time, reluctant before yielding to the request of the director. But his daughter already had only one idea in mind, that of freeing herself from all authority to build her own destiny. Catherine Spaak died in Rome on April 17, 2022, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 77 years old.
Free and conquering woman
She was born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts-de-Seine), on April 3, 1945, to an actress mother and a screenwriter father, of Belgian origin, who had written some of the scripts for the greatest titles in cinema. French before and after the war, as The Great Illusionby Jean Renoir, The Bandera and The great teamby Julien Duvivier, or mouth of love, by Jean Gremillon. Even though Teenage Girls did not meet the expected success, it was noticed there. Notably by Dino Risi, who entrusts him, in The Fanfaron, in 1962, the role of the daughter of the boastful and infantile character embodied by Vittorio Gassman. Inconsolable teenager hurt by the absence of a father, she seeks there, in the company of a mature man whom she plans to marry, to fill her emotional lack.
But the melancholic figure of the beginnings will quickly give way to a freer young woman. She drives men crazy in Boredom and its diversion, eroticismby Damiano Damiani after Moravia, in 1963, where she meets Bette Davis, in The Bugiardaby Luigi Comencini, in 1965, in love on horsebackby Pasquale Festa Campanile, in 1968, in A ragazza piuttosto complicatastill by Damiani, in 1969. She embodies a dazzling Mademoiselle de Maupin in Mauro Bolognini’s adaptation of Théophile Gautier’s novel in 1966.
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