During the shooting of the movie, producer Carlo Ponti was so appalled by Stéphane Audran's performance that he asked 'Who's that slut who's playing Fernande?' Director Claude Chabrol (who was already engaged to Audran) slapped Ponti in the face and screamed 'That's my woman!' The director and the actress married one year later.
The box office failure of Les bonnes femmes (1960), L'OEil du malin (1962), and Ophélia (1963), followed by the huge failure of Landru (1963), made it impossible for Claude Chabrol to find financial backing from producers for the films he wanted to make, forcing him to make more commercial films like Le Tigre aime la chair fraîche (1964) in order to keep directing.
Having made a considerable amount of money with her story as Landru's last fiancée, the real Fernande Segret (Audran's character) went to Lebanon, where she worked as a teacher for the next 40 years. On returning to France in 1965 she was outraged to discover that, assuming she was dead, the production company of this film had made no attempt to obtain permission to portray her in a film, not least using her real name. She won the resulting court case, a landmark case for French cinema. Segret died on January 21 1968 at Flers (Orne region), with pictures of her mother and Landru (whom she had maintained was innocent) by her bedside.
Fernande Segret received 10,000 French Francs in damages from Chabrol's film company. She drowned herself in the moat at the Chateau de Flers on the anniversary of Landru's marriage proposal.
The true story of serial killer Henri Désiré Landru had previously been adapted for cinema as Monsieur Verdoux (1947), directed by Charles Chaplin, and interestingly, that film was also a huge failure with critics and audiences that it almost ended Chaplin's career the same way that Landru (1963) nearly did to Claude Chabrol's career.
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