Yvonne Furneaux, actress with a gift for languages

Starring roles in the films of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Claude Chabrol and a distinctly French-sounding name meant that few British cinemagoers realised that Yvonne Furneaux was in reality a quintessentially English girl, albeit one with a gift for languages.
Her father was a Yorkshire bank manager, her mother came from Devon and, under the name Tessa Scatcherd, she was educated at Oxford and studied at Rada, where Joan Collins was a contemporary.
When she graduated from there in 1951, she combined her middle name and her mother’s maiden name to become Yvonne Furneaux. She subsequently came to believe that the stage name had been “a great mistake” for it was not only UK audiences but British directors who did not seem aware of her nationality.
“Combined with my rather continental appearance, it worked against me in getting English roles,” she complained.
Nevertheless, it worked like a charm on European directors as did her ability to speak fluent French and Italian, the result of having read modern languages at Oxford.
Antonioni was the first to realise her potential when he cast her as a promiscuous socialite having a string of affairs with men and women in his 1955 Italian-language film Le Amiche (The Girlfriends).
However, Furneaux’s most famous and satisfying role came five years later as Emma alongside Anita Ekberg as Sylvia and Anouk Aimée as Maddalena in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
As the aggrieved girlfriend of the womanising tabloid journalist Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni), she was first seen in the film in considerable distress and déshabillé, having taken an overdose in despair at her lover’s infidelity.
Later in the film’s most dramatic scene, Emma and Marcello argue late at night in a parked car. “What have I done to be treated this way?”, she tells him. He responds by accusing her of trying to turn him into a “spineless worm”. As the argument escalates, she takes up the description, yelling at him, “You’re a miserable worm, you’ll end up alone like a dog. Don’t you realise you’ve found life’s most important thing: a woman who really loves you, who’d die for you?”
The tension bursts into violence as Marcello tries to throw Emma out of the car and she bites his hand. He slaps her and drives off alone as the camera pans on to her clutching wildflowers picked from the roadside before he returns and she submissively gets into the car without a word.
It was an extraordinary scene and a bravura performance. Fellini was thrilled and regarded it as pivotal to the film, helping La Dolce Vita to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and a clutch of Oscar nominations. A landmark in cinematic history, it was subsequently voted the 6th greatest film of the 20th century by Entertainment Weekly, No 11 in Empire magazine’s list of the 100 best films of world cinema and 24th in the British Film Institute’s polls of the greatest films of all time.
Yet Britain, perhaps further deterred by her European success, continued to shun Furneaux, who went on to make a string of other European language films, although most of them were undistinguished. In French she played Mercedes in Claude Autant-Lara’s 1961 adaptation of Le Comte de Monte Cristo. There were numerous films in Italian with various directors including Marcello Baldi and she even tried out her German in the Argentinian director Hugo Fregonese’s 1964 sci-fi thriller The Secret Of Dr Mabuse.
When she was eventually cast in a film in her native tongue, in Roman Polanksi’s nightmarish 1965 horror thriller Repulsion — his first English-language film — it was not a happy experience. Playing the sister of Catherine Deneuve’s psychopathic character, she accused Polanski of subjecting the entire cast to “psychological torture”.
The director was particularly hard on Furneaux and at one point she ran to the executive producer Michael Klinger in tears, begging him to “tell that little bastard to leave me alone”.
When Klinger confronted the director and asked why he was giving Furneaux such a hard time, Polanski replied, “She’s a nice girl but she’s too bloody nice. She’s supposed to be playing a bitch. Every day I have to make her into a bitch.”
Two years later she was back on screen speaking French once more in Chabrol’s 1967 thriller Le Scandale, released in the English-speaking world as The Champagne Murders.
Yet it was to be her last big film as she increasingly devoted herself to raising a family with her husband, Jacques Natteau, a former RAF fighter pilot who had earned a Distinguished Flying Cross during the Second World War. They had met in 1961 on the set of Le Comte de Monte Cristo, on which he was working as a cinematographer and after marrying the following year the couple bought a dilapidated castle in Poggio Catino, 30 miles northeast of Rome. They spent several years restoring it while she continued her career but after the birth of their son Nicholas in 1969, she effectively retired.
Her husband died in 2007 and she is survived by her son.
Elisabeth Yvonne Scatcherd was born in 1926 in Roubaix, northern France, the daughter of Amy (née Furneaux) and Joseph Scatcherd, who had been posted across the Channel to manage an overseas branch of Lloyds Bank.
The family returned to Britain when she was 11 and in 1946 she went up to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she became active in university theatre groups. On graduating in 1949, she enrolled at Rada.
At first, the stage rather than the film set was her focus and after appearances in productions of Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew, she was photographed by Norman Parkinson for a feature titled The Young Look in the Theatre in a 1953 issue of Vogue alongside Natalie Wood, Jill Bennett and others.
Her early English-language film appearances included a 1953 adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Peter Brook and starring Laurence Olivier. That same year she appeared in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, the first of three films she was to make with a portly and past-his-best Errol Flynn. It led the Manchester Evening News to describe her speciality as “bold, black-eyed minxes who love not wisely but too well”.
Her versatility was evident when she co-starred with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as an Egyptian high priestess in the 1959 Hammer horror The Mummy but thereafter it was almost exclusively European directors to whom she looked for work.
There was a fleeting reappearance when she starred alongside Donald Pleasance and Zsa Zsa Gabor in the title role of the 1984 comedy Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tilly but her heart was not in it and there were no further comebacks. She spent her final years living in America.
Yvonne Furneaux, actress, was born on May 11, 1926. She died on July 5, 2024, aged 98