French Women with Excellent Bone Structure

Face Off: Francoise Hardy vs. Olga Georges-Picone

After seeing the recent BMA First Thursdays film presentation, Alain Renais' Je T'aime, Je T'aime (1968), my friend Scott Wallace Brown and I both remarked on how the sad-eyed female lead Olga Georges-Picot bore an uncanny resemblance to another sad-eyed French beauty, Yeh-Yeh chanteuse Francoise Hardy. Then my friend Cody the Librarian e-mailed me two headshots of these jeunne filles side-by-side under the subject line, "French Women with Excellent Bone Structure." That description is tres appropos, as their facial structures - not to mention eyes, pouty lips and hairstyles - are strikingly similar. And they both worked in film (though Hardy only made a handful of appearances, starring as Formula One racing groupie Lisa in Grand Prix (1966) and making a few uncredited cameos in What's New Pussycat?(1965) and Godard's 1966 story about a Yeh-Yeh singer, Masculin-Feminin).

I've been a longtime Francoise Hardy fan, but knowing nothing about this newly discovred beauty, I started looking Olga up. I then realized I had seen her in a number of movies without realizing who she was. Early on, before her breakout role in Je T'aime, Je T'aime, she was Audrey Hepburn's (uncredited) touring friend in Two for the Road (1967), the woman Edward Fox picked up and spent the night with (when the gendarmes were raiding his apartment) in The Day of the Jackal (1973) and the sexy Countess Alexandrovna in Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975). How did I miss her?


Claude Rich tries to turn Olga's frown upside down in "Je T'aime, Je T'aime"

According to the Internet Movie DataBase, she was the daughter of French ambassador Guillaume Georges-Picot and a Russian mother. Born in China in 1944, she died in a very French existential way - and one totally in keeping with her depressed Je T'aime, Je T'aime character Catrine - by suicide in 1997. I guess sad-eyed French girls suffering from ennui and existential angst is no act (is it because they're sick of men always macking on their surface qualities - like their excellent bone structure?). It makes me appreciate her role in this film even more in retrospect. Oh, by the way, the Je T'aime, Je T'aime was about a man who unsuccessfully attempted suicide after his girlfriend's death; irony of ironies.

Film trivia: French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and his wife Catherine have uncredited cameos in Je T'aime, Je T'aime. And there's another French woman with excellent bone structure (barely covered with a blue bath robe) who appears at the end of this film, tempting protagonist Claude Rich to towel her off in the bathroom, but I have no idea who she is. Anybody know?



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