ROMY SCHNEIDER :
ONCE UPON A TIME... ​

Behind the sparkling smile of the most famous empress of the seventh art hides a murkier truth, made up of renunciations, incessant quests for freedom and painful metamorphoses. In this book, Romy Schneider’s career is not simply recounted: it is dissected in the light of a childhood whose shadows have shaped every gesture, every look in front of the camera.

The title, Once upon a time... resonates like a tragic irony. Because if the world wanted to see her as a fairytale princess, the reality was that of a fierce struggle to get out of the straitjacket imposed by an omnipresent mother and by the specter of a Germany in search of redemption. From the forced candour of the Sissi years to the incandescence of Claude Sautet’s masterpieces, this book analyzes how Romy used her filmography as a territory of exorcism. Each role, from La Piscine to L’Important c’est d’aimer, is reread here as a stage in his personal construction — or deconstruction — .

The author explores this constant porosity between the screen and the intimate. How did the wounds of childhood, marked by the absence and weight of history, feed the dramatic intensity that made her a unique actress? Through the study of her collaborations with Visconti, Welles and Zulawski, the portrait of a woman who never ceased to seek in the eyes of directors the validation that a fragmented past denied her.

A poignant analysis of the price of fame and the quest for identity of an absolute artist.