Jeane Moreau in The Bride Wore Black

For Truffaut scholars, The Bride Wore Black is often regarded as a misguided amalgam of Hitchcock, film noir and the nouvelle vague. But it also features one of the most extraordinary and mercurial performances by Jeanne Moreau as the avenging angel of the title, the summation of a series of extraordinary roles in films such as Jules et Jim and Eva. This chapter examines Moreau's star image and acting in The Bride Wore Black in terms of her ever-shifting, mysterious, oblique and transnational persona and how she uses these elements to create a formidably concrete but elusive performance.