Yvonne Furneaux, Actress in Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ and Polanski’s ‘Repulsion,’ Dies at 98
Yvonne Furneaux, the glamorous actress who had memorable performances in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, has died. She was 98.
Furneaux died July 5 at her home in North Hampton, New Hampshire, of complications from a stroke, her son, Nicholas Natteau, told The Hollywood Reporter.
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She also was the female lead in the Hammer horror film The Mummy (1959), starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Though she considered the project less than ideal, she said she ultimately learned from those actors that “if you don’t take a film like The Mummy seriously and put your heart and soul into it, then you can bring it down,” she explained in Mark A. Miller’s 2010 book, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema.
She starred in Italian, French, German and Spanish films during her career.
In Le Amiche (1955), a hit at the Venice Film Festival that proved to be Antonioni’s breakthrough movie, Furneaux played a vindictive socialite, and she was Emma, the desperately in love fiancée of Marcello Mastroianni’s tabloid journalist, in the Fellini masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960).
In Polanski’s psychological thriller Repulsion (1965), she portrayed the older sister of Catherine Deneuve’s disturbed Carol Ledoux.
Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd was born to British parents on May 11, 1926, in Roubaix, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France. She and her family moved to England, and she attended the Oxford school St. Hilda’s College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1951.
Furneaux — that was her mother’s maiden name — appeared onstage in Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew and showed up in her first films, Meet Me Tonight and the Merle Oberon-starring Affair in Monte Carlo, in 1952.
The next year, she acted in The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Peter Brook and starring Laurence Olivier, and Michael Anderson’s The House of the Arrow and portrayed Errol Flynn’s mistress in The Master of Ballantrae. (She also worked opposite Flynn in 1954’s Crossed Swords and 1955’s The Warriors.)
Her résumé also included the features Lisbon (1956), Claude Autant-Lara’s Le meurtrier (1963), The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964) and Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders (1967) and a 1965 episode of the British TV show Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan.
She was married to French cinematographer Jacques Natteau — they met while filming 1961’s The Story of The Count of Monte Cristo — from 1962 until his death in 2007. Survivors also include her daughter-in-law, Leiva.
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