Interview: Leslie Caron, dancer, actress and writer

Published on Wednesday 30 September 2009 20:51

LESLIE Caron has kissed Nureyev, danced with Astaire and Kelly, and talked film with Renoir…it's no wonder Lee Randall is a little starstruck

LESLIE Caron is a petite lady with an enormous – and dazzling – list of accomplishments. She started life as a ballerina, performing as a soloist in Roland Petit's troupe while still just a teenager. Indeed, while a member of his troupe she came to the second ever Edinburgh Festival, performing before the Royal Family.

Back in Paris, she was spotted dancing by Gene Kelly, who chose her as his co-star in An American in Paris. She went on to dance with Mr Poetry in Motion himself, Fred Astaire, in the film Daddy Long Legs. She's acted opposite everyone from Orson Welles and Rudolf Nureyev to Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Dirk Bogarde and Maurice Chevalier, to drop just a few names. Offstage, Caron had three husbands, including British theatre director Peter Hall, with whom she has two children. She left him for Warren Beatty.

Breathless yet? Film director Jean Renoir (who wrote a play for her) and writer Christopher Isherwood were Caron's most important mentors, and one of her closest friends is Jack Larson – he played Jimmy Olsen on the old Superman television show and went on to become a noted librettist – whom she met at a pool party at Debbie Reynolds' house. Among her awards are a Bafta, a Golden Globe and an Emmy, and she wears a discreet red dot on her lapel, signalling that she's a recipient of France's prestigious Legion of Honour.

For nearly 20 years, when not acting in recent films such as Le Divorce and Damages, she's run a successful auberge in Burgundy, which, she tells me now – news alert! – is up for sale. Along the way she found time to pen a well-reviewed collection of short stories.

Joining that book is her just-published autobiography, Thank Heaven, a frank reappraisal of her 78 years. She admits to countless revisions to get the tone just right. "Let's face it," she writes, "there's no more useless exercise than to falsify one's biography. It's difficult enough to have a clear recollection of people and events, memory being selective, partial and biased, but why hide the odd embarrassing moments?"

Small and perfectly formed, Caron is elegance personified and radiantly beautiful. Her infectious laugh comes easily and often, though she's not above referring me back to her book when she thinks I've asked about something that's already amply documented. What can I say? I'm a movie lover and a bit starstruck.

Of course, she meant to be the next Anna Pavlova, and even practised christening herself Caronova, but suffered an attack of nerves on meeting Petit and, when asked, blurted out her real name. Nevertheless, Kelly's offer was one she couldn't refuse.

"We Parisians knew who Gene Kelly was, of course. At that time he'd supplanted Fred, because he was much younger and of the new style. Astaire's style seemed a little dated in the 1950s, when musicals became more athletic and less ballroom. There were the choreographers Jack Coles and Jerome Robbins, whose work was overtaking Broadway with a completely new style of dancing, and Gene represented that. Eventually it evened out, Fred came back in fashion again – Astaire is eternal."

Indeed. Though I always felt that, while one could imagine Kelly having sex, the same couldn't be said for Astaire. Cue peals of laughter and a confidential lift of the eyebrows. "You'd be quite wrong," she purrs. "I didn't have an affair with either, but, of the two, I would say Fred was keener on women. Fred was very much a man! Don't be fooled by the white tie and the buttoned cuffs."

What was it like working with them? I have heard they were meticulous perfectionists. "You're right, there was no room for improvisation while you were filming. Gene had two assistants, and Fred had only one. One of Gene's assistants was Carol Haney, who went on to star in The Pajama Game. If I learned how to dance jazz, it's thanks to her. I totally imitated her style. She was even part of the choreography, she was quite inventive.

"Gene had this remarkable technical talent to visualise what it would look like on the screen, such as his use of diagonals and using all the possibilities of the space by thinking of what camera would film which part. Both men, being very good dancers, used long takes. When you see a musical film with cuts to the feet, cuts to the arms, cuts to the neck – you know they can't dance. Or that the choreographer is not a dancer. When you see a film by Kelly, the camera doesn't move too much, the dancers move, and there are very few cuts, maybe once in a while a close-up on an intricate foot thing."

Astaire once summoned her to the set of Daddy Long Legs to film a complicated dance sequence she hadn't rehearsed. She wasn't supposed to work that day, as it had been set aside to allow him to film a tricky bit of business with a tea trolley, but he nailed it in one take. Did she panic? "You couldn't be nervous with Fred. First of all, he had this enormous hand," she splays hers to full capacity to demonstrate, "and it's like when you're driving a horse, if you're good horseman you give orders with your foot and with your hand, and Fred was like that. The hand behind told you what to do. The hand, the foot, the hip, the knee – you just knew what to do."

Remarkably, when she worked with Nureyev, in Ken Russell's Valentino, there was no dancing involved. "But we did have the longest kiss in movie history! Thank God I was very supple; he bent my waist all the way to the floor. Nureyev was adorable. He was somebody you couldn't help loving. And excessive and Russian, tempestuous and extremely rude."

She laughs. "He would say, 'You dance like c***!' He used foul language, but he wasn't a foul person. He had a very gentle soul and he suffered very much from not being able to go back to Russia and see his family. He adored his mother and was kept away for years and years. That was the most painful thing in his life. Nureyev was a very tender person. Of course, he was the greatest technician, but he could not have danced as he did – he gave sentiment to his pas de deux and there really was rapport when he danced with a girl. He was not just being technically brilliant."

Of Jean Renoir – film director and son of the Impressionist painter – she says he was like a second father. "His entire way of living was an example." She describes a household that threw open its doors to family and friends every Sunday, where mealtimes were an opportunity not only to entertain lavishly, though not ostentatiously, but also to enjoy scintillating conversation.

"It was human contact that interested him, so conversations picked on any small subject, like the tree in his garden – suddenly you learn about olive trees and the importance of his olive tree, and how he'd saved it, and then how olive trees brought back his father, and the way his father, Auguste Renoir, raised his children to respect their eyes by never working after sundown. They were lessons all day long in magnanimous behaviour and nobility of the mind, nobility of behaviour."

What sorts of advice did he offer? She laughs. "Oh, that was adorable. I was starting to learn to write and struggling with a film script. He gave me two pieces of advice. The first was 'never kill hope'. Period. Never kill hope until the last breath in any human being. And the other advice was that I asked him how late one could start learning this new craft. He paused and then, with a quizzical expression and a shrug, said, '80?'" When she complained that she was on a slow learning curve, this wise man said: "One must hit the nail over the head many times before it consents to enter."

Both Renoir and Christopher Isherwood were not only men of staggering intellectual depth, but spiritual depth as well, according to Caron. And both had tremendous respect for authority. "They respected the law; they respected doctors; they respected the president. That surprised me."

Already a little awestruck when they met in 1957, she writes, "I fancied (Isherwood's] company so much that I waited for him to be gone before I started to read his books. I didn't want the legend to come between us."

What was the attraction for her? "I was star-struck by the scope of his character and his humility. (He was] so modest, and so democratic. We didn't talk about books, because at that point I was not well read. Remember, I practically didn't go to school. But he would talk a lot about Sally Bowles. The real Sally Bowles. And he broke the legend. He would say, well, she was a slut and had these crazy political opinions and was very eccentric, but he kept on seeing her until her death.

"He was very attached to her and he had friends from all over the spectrum. He had friends who were grand literary characters, like Auden, who was his childhood schoolfriend, all the way to really very simple folk."

There's a wonderful moment in her memoir recalling a period when Tennessee Williams took up residence in Isherwood's guest room. The men were great friends, but privately Isherwood had doubts – never imagining that his houseguest was locked away creating his first great masterpiece. "Chris thought of him as a nice guy, and the poetry was mediocre – and then The Glass Menagerie came on the stage and blew us all away. It is terribly moving, and it is his story. It's surprising how candid and childlike Tennessee was in person. As a matter of fact, I went on the guidelines of two people in writing this book. One was Tennessee's open candour, and the other was Colette, who is one of my favourite writers. When she wrote about people around her, she just said everything important, tastefully, but she said things."

&#149 Thank Heaven is out now from JR books, 18.99.