“Last Tango In Paris” actress Maria Schneider dies at age 58

Maria Schneider’s film career started around 1969 with small, uncredited appearances. It was French actor, Alain Delon who gave her a big break and in 1972 Schneider was picked by director Bernardo Bertolucci to star along side Marlon Brando in the controversial film “Last Tango in Paris” in which a young girl from Paris gets involved with a middle-aged American businessman, played by Marlon Brando, in a relationship based only on sex. Schneider checked herself into a mental hospital after completing the film and later accused Brando and Bertolucci of exploiting her. She described the director as “a gangster and a pimp”, and called the experience “rape” adding that Last Tango taught her a big lesson: “Never take your clothes off for a middle-aged man who claims that it’s art.”

She decided to never do films with nude scenes again. However, she starred in another Italian film “The Passenger” (1975) directed by Michelangelo Antonioni alongside Jack Nicholson where she agreed to appear in nude for one shot. For the most part the rest of Schneider’s career, perhaps undistinguished, was spent starring in low-budget European films such as “Memoirs of a French Whore” (1979) and “Mamma Dracula” (1980) while she became the subject of a scandal, a suicide attempt and ongoing drug addiction. She suffered from a ‘long illness’ and was 58 years old.