She may be best known as the dewy 19-year-old who was the focus of Marlon Brando’s bronchitic exertions in Last Tango in Paris, but Maria Schneider believes that the most important film of her career came a few years later, in 1975 — Michelangelo Antonioni’s seminal anti-thriller The Passenger.

Now a trim 54-year-old with a mercurially expressive face (she’s not a fan of the freezing, lifting and primping that many of her contemporaries have embraced), Schneider is clearly enjoying the opportunity to talk about the film. “Michelangelo has always been ahead of his time. If you see Blow Up, Zabriskie Point, all this work hasn’t aged, it’s still fresh. Compare that to Last Tango, which now feels typically 1970s.”

It’s certainly true that a comparison between The Passenger and Last Tango makes the latter look faintly ridiculous, but what’s more telling is the obvious influence that Antonioni has on young directors today. The Mexican director Carlos Reygadas is a notable example and there are others who cite Antonioni as an inspiration. Not so many, it has to be said, look to the sweaty melodramas of Bertolucci.

It has been frustrating then for film buffs that The Passenger, arguably one of Antonioni’s greatest works, has been remarkably difficult to see. The reason for this is that Jack Nicholson, Schneider’s co-star in the film, held the rights to the movie, and until recently prevented it from being released on video or DVD (it is, however, due for release on DVD on July 3). Even public screenings require his permission.

Background

• Last Tango in Paris

• Last Tango in Paris - Sunday Times review

• Haunted by that last tango

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Schneider is at a loss to explain Nicholson’s protective attitude to the film. One theory, she says, is that he viewed himself as the collector of a piece of art. “Then, about ten years ago, I heard that he wanted to adapt the film into a theatre play.”

It’s hard to think of a film less suited to theatre. The wide-open vistas and sense of perpetual journey would effectively be amputated by the confines of the stage. “But Jack is a weirdo,” says Schneider with a smoky laugh.

She thinks that she had a far happier experience during the making of The Passenger than Nicholson did. She felt far closer to her character than she did to Tango’s temperamental sexpot — “She doesn’t have any name, she travels.”

Schneider herself spent ten nomadic years living out of bags and drifting from hotel to hotel. “It was the 1970s, we didn’t want to own property, we wanted to change the world.”

She developed a friendship with the director and still sees him. “He’s 93 and he had a stroke. He doesn’t speak but he paints.”

Nicholson, however, had a harder time. “Antonioni is not an actor’s director. You swim, you follow him. But Jack wanted acting direction, the US way of making movies. So he was kind of lost because Michelangelo doesn’t tell you anything. Jack was really uneasy during the filming. He was having hamburgers flown to Spain.”

Nicholson was, recalls Schneider, a very competitive actor. She describes him as being like a solo musician not interested in listening to others. Brando was the opposite, a collaborative and generous actor. It seems that one of the few positive things that came from the experience of making Last Tango is the enduring respect Schneider has for her co-star.

A teenage cinephile who was watching three or four films a week by the age of 14, Schneider left home at 15 after an argument with her mother. She supported herself by working as an extra, which is how she met Brigitte Bardot. Bardot knew Schneider’s father, the actor Daniel Gélin, and took the teenager under her wing, offering her a room in her house.

It was a time that Schneider remembers as being “just wonderful. She was 33, just gorgeous. And I would watch her, learn how to walk.”

Bardot proved to be a very effective calling card to the film industry. “I met agents, I met Warren Beatty. He called the William Morris agency and said, I’ve seen this fantastic new girl, she’s so great. And he had seen nothing!” But the gilded period soon tarnished with the experience of Last Tango. “The manipulation by Bertolucci was heavy. Even Marlon felt raped and he was 42. I turned 20 during the film. I lost 10 kilos during the shooting. I became a woman — I was a girl before.”

The aftermath of the film was almost as difficult to bear. “I didn’t like to go to restaurants to be looked at like an animal, especially by old men with shiny eyes.”

Schneider turned to drugs to block out the gaze of the press. She also started a doomed relationship with the American photographer Joan Townsend that attracted yet more lurid coverage. “I was a junkie at the end. It took seven years. I lost a lot of friends. I stopped in 1980. I met an angel, whom I am still with. You can’t have the strength to go it alone.”

The identity of her “angel” is a secret that Schneider has guarded jealously for the past quarter-century, having learnt the hard way that privacy is best protected.

Now she is working regularly, although not quite as frequently as she would like. In her spare time she works for an organisation called The Wheel Turns which supports actors, dancers and other performers who have reached the end of their careers. “It’s a very precarious existence. My advice to young actors would be to know how to do another job.”

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