Nicole Stéphane, l’insoumise

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Nicole Stéphane played many roles in the world of cinema: she was an actress who made her name with Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la mer (1947), as well as director, screenwriter and producer of films that, like her, took part in history. In December 1942, at the age of 18, Nicole Stéphane, born Rothschild, crossed the Pyrenees to join the Free French Forces, which she joined after a spell in a Barcelona prison. In 1948, she travelled with Henri Decae to the newly proclaimed State of Israel, in the midst of the War of Independence, to film David Ben Gourion and mark her commitment to Zionism. She returned during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War to make the short films La Génération du désert and Une guerre pour une paix. She also produced, on the same subject, the film Promised Land (1974) by Susan Sontag, who became her companion. And it was also with the American essayist that Nicole Stéphane travelled to the former Yugoslavia to shoot Godot à Sarajevo (1993). For Nicole Rothschild-Stéphane was a free and daring producer who put her indomitable energy into filming Frédéric Rossif’s documentary Mourir à Madrid (1963) and produced dramas by René Allio (L’une et l’autre, 1967) and Marguerite Duras (Détruire dit-elle, 1969).