Pic of the Day: Francoise Dorleac

I feel a special connection to Uncle Scoopy's Pic o' the Day

When I was about 18, I had no idea who Catherine Deneuve was, but I had my schoolboy crush on the woman in today's pic, Francoise Dorleac, Deneuve's older sister.

How can that be if you never even heard of her?

Long story. Kinda.

Those were the days when the world shut down at 11, even convenience stores. The only worthwhile offering from the television networks after the local news at 11 (10 Central) was the Tonight show, so some non-NBC stations showed a film, then played the national anthem and bid us good night.

That was a different world, and perhaps a better one in some ways.

One of the stations in our town had a different cinema theme for each night of the week. Chiller Theater popped up on Friday, with the obligatory spooky host. There was a Comedy Night, A Night for Romance, and so forth. One of the nights (Saturday, I think) featured Super Spy Theater. It doesn't seem possible now that such a minor sub-genre could once have been capable of commanding an entire night, but that was a very frigid point in the Cold War and, spurred by the success of the first three Bond films, America was running wild for "super spies."

That's where I first saw Francoise Dorleac: on Super Spy Theater, on a sultry night, when I was home from college for summer vacation, with no date for the night, unable to sleep, watching a David Niven movie called Where the Spies Are. By the time I got around to looking up Francoise's bio, I found out she was dead. In fact I think she had already died before I first became aware of her, although I can't swear to have remembered the chronology with any real precision.

Her car flipped in the south of France, somewhere near Nice.

She was 25.

And now I face the overwhelming reality that my boyhood crush, who was not so much older than I, has been dead for 44 years.

Memento Mori.