COVID-19: Death of director Nelly Kaplan, icon of the New Wave
Nelly Kaplan in 2005. The French director died at 89 from COVID-19.
Share November 12, 2020 10:23 a.m. Share COVID-19: Death of director Nelly Kaplan, icon of the Nouvelle Vague Agence France-Presse PARIS – Nelly Kaplan, French director of La Fiancée du Pirate (1969), anarcho-feminist writer and icon of the Nouvelle Vague, died Thursday morning of COVID-19 at the age of 89 in a hospital in Geneva, we learned from those around him.
According to one of his relatives, François Martinet, who had interviewed him at length for the review Les Cahiers du Cinéma , Nelly Kaplan had accompanied his companion, the French actor and producer Claude Makowski. in Geneva where he died in August of Parkinson's disease.
She had since been in a nursing home where she contracted COVID-19, from which she died.
Nelly Kaplan, originally from a family of Russian Jews, who came to France from Buenos Aires at the age of 22, had made his film debut with director Abel Gance. She was to collaborate with him for ten years.
Nelly Kaplan loved literature, especially poetry, and bonded with several writers, including Philippe Soupault and André Breton.
She had written erotic writings that had to face censorship. In 1974, she published under a pseudonym her novel Mémoires d'une liseuse de draps .
She became known by La Fiancée du pirate , a film selected for the Venice Film Festival in 1969, with Bernadette Laffont in the role of a free young woman who takes revenge on villagers who are hostile to her. The film, shown around the world, has become cult.
She has directed other films: Papa, les petits Bateaux … (1971), Néa (1976), Charles and Lucie (1979), Pattes de velours (1985), Plaisir d'amour (1990), as well as documentaries dedicated to artists and celebrities (Gustave Moreau, Abel Gance, André Masson, Victor Hugo, Pablo Picasso, etc.).
