Marie Déa

Marie Déa — Biography

Eurydice in Jean Cocteau's Orphée is the role for which French actress Marie Déa is remembered above all. Born Odette Alice Marie Deupès, she worked on stage, in cinema and on television, and between 1939 and 1983 she appeared in more than fifty films. She was married to the actor Lucien Nat.

Her film career opened with Personal Column in 1939. The high point came in 1950 with Orphée, the now-classic film in which she played Cocteau's Eurydice alongside Jean Marais. In the 1950s she appeared in films such as Caroline Chérie and Ouvert contre X and played Anaïs Maloret in The Green Mare. In the early 1960s she took part in films such as Two Are Guilty and Assassin in the Phonebook, as Madame Winter in the first and Édith in the second.

In later years she took supporting parts rather than leads: the landlady in Marriage, Madame Blanchot in The Good and the Bad, the mother in The Hurried Man and the aunt Gisèle Valin in Armaguedon. In 1978 she also appeared in The Little Wheedlers, and her screen work continued until 1983. She died in Paris on 1 March 1992.