Yvonne Furneaux, a raven-haired actress raised on both sides of the English Channel who found acclaim playing women navigating the sexual freedoms of the 1960s in films including “La Dolce Vita” and the psychological drama “Repulsion,” died July 5 at her home in North Hampton, N.H. She was 98.
The cause was a stroke, said her son, Nicholas Natteau.
Born in France to British parents and multilingual, Ms. Furneaux fit well into the spirit of an age when cultural and social boundaries in Europe were being toppled by a postwar generation impatient for change. She worked with French, German, Spanish, American and British directors — as well as Italian filmmakers in her breakout roles — in more than 30 films from dark comedies to horror.
She was best known, however, for characters who embraced the free-spirit modernity of the jet set, or as playing the “other woman” in turbulent and ill-fated relationships.
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The British press in the 1960s sometimes referred to her as a “tigress” of cinema, commenting on her sexually confident roles, her striking green eyes and an accent that could be flavored with hints of French and Italian.
She laughed off the descriptions. She reminded interviewers of her early films playing damsels in distress in swashbuckling films starring Errol Flynn in the 1950s and as a 4,000-year-old princess in 1959’s “The Mummy” by Britain’s horror-flick factory, Hammer Films.
Yet she also liked to cultivate an image as a screen siren and a real-life devotee of a flirty and fun-seeking ethos. Shortly after the premiere of Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” in 1960, Ms. Furneaux met with a correspondent for Britain's Evening Standard for co*cktails near Rome’s Spanish Steps. She claimed to enjoy the attentions of Italy’s sweet-tongued lotharios.
“They will tell the most dreadful lies,” she said. “No girl is safe here. Oh, it’s just marvelous.”
In Fellini’s film, Ms. Furneaux played Emma, the anguished live-in girlfriend of a philandering journalist, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). Their toxic life together was part of Fellini’s commentary on decadence, consumerism and a man adrift amid temptations and self-doubt. (The other women in Marcello’s life in the film include a wealthy lover played by the French actress Anouk Aimée and an innocent soul portrayed by Anita Ekberg.)
In one scene, Marcello returns home after spending the night with a prostitute to find Emma had attempted suicide by overdose. As their relationship reached a breaking point, Emma and Marcello quarrel in a car parked in the bleak outskirts of Rome. “What have I done to be treated this way?” she tells Marcello after declaring her love for him. “Not even a dog gets treated like this.” Marcello accuses her of smothering him with “sticky, maternal love.”
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Emma bites his hand when he tries to toss her out of the car. He slaps her. As dawn breaks, she is shown holding wildflowers, alone by the roadside. Marcello, contrite for the moment, returns and she rides back home with him.
Fellini praised Ms. Furneaux’s performance as deeply authentic, saying that Ekberg and others received more attention from reviewers because their characters were more “mysterious, were thus more intriguing.”
In her next major film, Ms. Furneaux was cast by director Roman Polanski in his exploration of London’s Swinging Sixties in “Repulsion” (1965).
Ms. Furneaux’s character, Helen, finds liberation in the club scene and casual sex with her married boyfriend, while her sister Carol (Catherine Deneuve) slips deeper into a nightmarish cocoon of self-loathing and rejection of pleasure.
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After the movie’s release, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther lauded Ms. Furneaux for a convincing performance as the “subtly contentious older sister” who allowed the brewing “maelstrom of violence and horror.”
According to the 2007 book “Polanski: A Biography” by celebrity chronicler Christopher Sandford, Ms. Furneaux and Polanski had their own tense moments. The director reportedly tried to provoke anger and unease among the actors, seeking to have them carry those emotions onto the set. Ms. Furneaux pleaded with executive producer Michael Klinger to have Polanski ease off, Sandford wrote.
“Why are you giving the girl such a hard time?” Klinger asked the filmmaker. “Michael, I know she’s a nice girl,” Polanski replied, according to the book’s account. “She’s too bloody nice. She is supposed to be playing a b----. Every day I have to make her into a b----.”
Studied drama in London
Ms. Furneaux was born May 11, 1926, in Roubaix, France, and named Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd. Her father was a director at a Lloyds Bank branch, and her mother, whose family name was Furneaux, tended to the home.
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The family moved to Britain when Elisabeth was 11 and she later studied modern languages at St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, learning Italian and perfecting her French. She was then accepted at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1951.
She found her first professional roles on the London stage in productions that included Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” In the January 1953 issue of Vogue magazine’s British edition, she was part of a photo spread (with her newly adopted name Yvonne Furneaux) on the theater world’s promising young talent.
Film roles soon came. She played a jilted lover in Peter Brook’s musical “The Beggar’s Opera” (1953), starring Laurence Olivier; and made three adventure films starring Flynn, the last being “The Dark Avenger” (1955).
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That year she made her Italian cinema debut in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Le Amiche,” or “The Girlfriends,” starring with four other women (Eleonora Rossi Drago, Madeleine Fischer, Valentina Cortese and Anna Maria Pancani) dealing with the ups and downs of life in Turin.
Ms. Furneaux’s character, Momina, worldly and jaded, is recently separated from her husband, has a new lover and finds the best way to deal with problems is to talk them out over drinks. When the series “Sex and the City” first aired in 1998, many reviewers looked back on Momina as something of a mid-1950s prototype for Kim Cattrall’s character, Samantha.
After Ms. Furneaux co-starred in Ray Milland’s crime drama “Lisbon” (1956), a Hollywood production shot in Portugal, she returned to the theater for a Shakespeare tour in India. On her return in 1958, she stopped in Rome for a short holiday. A call came from the office of American producer and talk show host David Susskind, who wanted to cast her in a CBS television production of Emily Brontë’s novel “Wuthering Heights.”
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“I screamed,” she told the Daily News. “I was so excited! America at last … I caught the next plane out, without even seeing the Colosseum.”
During the 1960s, she appeared in films including “The Story of the Count of Monte Cristo” (1961) — where she met her future husband, cinematographer Jacques Natteau — and the 1967 thriller “The Champagne Murders,” co-starring with Anthony Perkins. She mostly retired from acting in the early 1970s but made a brief comeback in the oddball comedy “Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie” (1984).
Ms. Furneaux and Natteau were married in 1962. Natteau died in 2007. Survivors include her son.
Her reputation as a self-assured achiever was far from reality, she said. She described herself as full of insecurities during her years on the stage and screen.
“I’m so nervous,” she once told the Manchester Evening News. “I always think this part is going to be my last.”
