My Cousin Maria: A Memoir
Vanessa Schneider
Translated by Molly Ringwald
The late French actress Maria Schneider is perhaps best known for playing Jeanne in the provocative film Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and released to international shock and acclaim in 1972. It was Maria’s first major role, alongside film legend Marlon Brando, when she was barely eighteen years old. The experience would haunt her for the rest of her life, traumatizing her and sparking a tabloid firestorm that only ceased when she began to retreat from the public eye nearly two decades later.
To Maria’s much younger cousin, Vanessa Schneider, Maria was a towering figure of another kind—a beautiful and fearsome fixture in Vanessa’s childhood, a rising star turned pariah whose career and struggles with addiction won the family shame and pride in equal measure. Here, Vanessa recounts the challenges of their overlapping youths and fraught adulthood and reveals both the tragedy and inevitability of Maria’s path in a family plagued by mental illness and in a society rife with misogyny.
Unsentimental and moving, My Cousin Maria Schneider is a love letter to a talented artist and the cousin who admired her, and a powerful story of exploitation and how its lingering effects can reverberate through a lifetime.
“Elegantly translated from the French by Molly Ringwald, My Cousin Maria Schneider is both a beautiful eulogy and a much-needed corrective — an opportunity to finally set the record straight... a generous account of a rare and complicated cinematic star.”
“A touching tribute... Maria Schneider, with all her adventures and struggles, deserves to be better remembered, and her cousin shows us why. This stunning tale of Maria Schneider and her battles is stark yet consistently loving—and unforgettable.”
“Translated by actress Ringwald, this is an intriguing addition to the growing body of literature reexamining women’s agency through a post-#MeToo lens.”
“With devastating power and great originality of style, this gorgeous memoirs hows the film industry’s brutality toward young women and the ways in which shame can waft into a sensitive girl’s bedroom like a draft under a door. In Molly Ringwald’s luminous translation, Vanessa Schneider’s love letter to her famous actress cousin—and to her own 1970s French bohemian childhood—delivers the emotional impact of great fiction while also faithfully telling an important true-life story about misogyny in our time.”