Olga Georges-Picot

Olga Georges-Picot — Biography

Olga Georges-Picot was born on 6 January 1940 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the daughter of Guillaume Georges-Picot, France's ambassador to China, and his Russian wife, Anastasia Mironovich; she was a great-niece of the diplomat François Georges-Picot, remembered for the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In the early 1950s she attended the International School in Geneva with her sister, then the Lycée français de New York (class of 1958), and trained as an actress at the Actors Studio in Paris.

She made her breakthrough as Catrine in Alain Resnais's Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), the same year she appeared in the French television film Thibaud the Crusader, and was later featured in Playboy's "Sex in Cinema" column and on the cover of Adam magazine. Achieving international recognition between 1968 and 1975, she appeared opposite Roger Moore in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), played the OAS mole Denise in Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal (1973), and took the role of Countess Alexandrovna in Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975); she also worked in more art-house territory, including Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings of Pleasure.

Olga Georges-Picot took her own life on 19 June 1997, jumping from the fifth floor of an apartment building in Paris.