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Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress and pioneering female film producer. Danièle Delorme: 'Gigi' 1949 actress was pioneering woman producer, politically minded 'femme engagée' Danièle Delorme, who died on Oct. 17, '15, at the age of 89 in Paris, is best remembered as the first actress to incarnate Colette's teenage courtesan-to-be Gigi and for playing Jean Rochefort's about-to-be-cuckolded wife in the international box office hit Pardon Mon Affaire. Yet few are aware that Delorme was featured in nearly 60 films – three of which, including Gigi, directed by France's sole major woman filmmaker of the '40s and '50s – in addition to more than 20 stage plays and a dozen television productions in a show business career spanning seven decades. Even fewer realize that Delorme was also a pioneering woman film producer, working in that capacity for more than half a century. Or that she was what in French is called a femme engagée...

Grande dame of French film whose career spanned more than a half-century

Danièle Delorme, who has died aged 89, began acting professionally in 1942 and continued until the end of the century in films, television and theatre. But the earliest part of her long and prestigious career is most remembered internationally.

Delorme started in films as a fragile and elegant, slightly coquettish ingenue, notably in three pictures directed by Jacqueline Audry, based on novels by Colette: Gigi (1949), Minne, l’Ingénue Libertine (1950) and Mitsou (1956). She was described by her first husband, the actor Daniel Gélin, as having “the face of a little girl, an upturned nose with passionate nostrils, the lips of a child, the body of a woman and a certain way about her that turns heads”.

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