Antoinette Moya

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.