Jean-Louis Barrault, María Casares and Albert Camus looking beyond cool, 1948.
Here’s your salacious historical gossip for the day: Casares was married to actor André Schlesser but she has admitted to having a 16 year affair with Camus who was also married at the time. He was also having affairs with three other women at the when he died in a car crash at age 46. The Guardian writes:
Camus had met Maria Casares, later star of Cocteau’s Orpheus but already an established actress, in 1944. Daughter of a rich Spanish Republican, a refugee from Franco, she was a passionate, wilful, intelligent woman. She was probably the only one of his lovers who had a relationship of equality with him. In addition, Todd says, ‘If he was a Don Juan, she was a Don Juana’….
Far from being a Parisian intellectual with little conscience about his affairs, Camus’ relationships were important to him. 'He had a much more healthy relationship with women than Sartre,’ [biographer Olivier] Todd says. 'His relationships were quite moving’….
But you cannot convincingly attach a lugubrious alibi to a personality of such rigorous honesty as Camus: the communist who, unlike Sartre, condemned Stalin’s labour camps when their existence was revealed; and the consumptive journalist who worked in occupied Paris for the clandestine paper, Combat, while the upper-class spokesman for communism, Sartre, led an unmolested life of intellectual and material ease.
Image source: Albert Camus.