Ronald Bergan’s fine obituary of Michèle Morgan shows how, like so many other of Europe’s creative people, her life was fractured by fascism and war in the 1930s and 1940s.
Her performance in The Fallen Idol (1948) throws clear light on this. With the writer Graham Greene and the director Carol Reed at the top of their form, this little masterpiece is set in the embassy of a French-speaking nation in postwar London. Morgan plays a typist in love with the embassy’s English butler, Baines, superbly played by Ralph Richardson.
She personifies a woman whose exile and work have forced her to learn English and English ways, when she so obviously longs for French language and customs. Helped not only by Richardson but by actors including Sonia Dresdel, Jack Hawkins and Bobby Henrey (in perhaps the finest peformance by a child in cinema history), Morgan evokes the pain both of a woman lost in love and also of a French refugee alone in London.
