Antoinette Moya(1928-2021)
- Actress
Even if theater has always been Antoinette Moya's prime activity (she
has been in stage plays by such great names as Molière, Marivaux,
Gorki, Pirandello, Jules Romain, Anouilh, Audiberti, Duras, Dario Fo,
...), the French actress is not averse to cinema. Agreed, her first
appearances in the fifties and sixties are scant, but from the 1970's
she has become a regular of Gallic movies. She can be a bit player, a
character actress or even the female star : in Michel Soutter's
interesting 'L'Escapade' (1974), and in Jan Saint-Hamont's mediocre
comedy 'Qu'est-ce que j'ai fait au Bon Dieu pour avoir une femme qui
boit dans les cafés avec les filles?', whose only distinctive sign is
the longer than average title. Often a mother (Isabel Adjani's mum in
'L'année prochaine ... si tout va bien'/1981, Samuel Le Bihan's one in
'Jet Set'/1999) or a mother-in-law ( 'Coup de sang'/2006), she can also
be spotted as a customer or a roadside diner cashier, a makeup artist
or an estate agent. She is rarely crotchety or peevish (Michel
Serrault's wife in Robert Enrico's very good noir 'Pile ou face'/1980).
Most of the time she is next-door neighbor or your local shopkeeper,
the good-natured person with whom you chat about one thing or another,
with whom you deal only with safe unimportant subjects but who makes
you feel you are still connected with the others. Antoinette Moya has a
particular knack for making such characters credible, so true-to-life
that viewers are unable to remember her name. On the other hand, she
has been a very faithful follower of a director who is anything but
federative, Jean Marboeuf. Her reward in 1994 was the very unexpected
role of Eugénie Pétain, the wife of Philippe Pétain, the controversial
historical figure, once the savior of France then a puppet in the
Nazis' hands in old age.
